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International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

HCII 2021: Social Computing and Social Media: Experience Design and Social Network Analysis pp 149–166Cite as

The Presumed Happiness of the Smiling Pile of Poo – How Emojis are Perceived by People

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 12774)

Abstract

Emojis are widely used in digital communication, especially on phones. This makes them an important part of our multimedia experience. While most emojis are equally perceived among people, some are not. Using such emojis in UIs might lower the user experience. Furthermore, they should be used with care in communication. To get a better understanding of how people perceive emojis, we performed a survey on 15 emojis that potentially cause misunderstandings in digital communication. The responses from 1,811 participants help to interpret emojis used in online texts, as well as in text-based communication. In this article, we provide an experience report about the creation and performance of our survey as well as the results. The detailed discussion of 15 emojis provides future directions for research on how these are used. This forms the foundation for more detailed and specific future analyses aimed at exploring the potential causes of digital miscommunication.

Keywords

  • Emoji
  • Emotion
  • Mobile computing
  • Communication
  • Survey

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.limesurvey.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://emojione.com.

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Acknowledgments

The research described in this paper was performed in the project Opti4Apps (grant no. 02K14A182) of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and EnStadt: Pfaff (grant no. 03SBE112D and 03SBE112G) of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We would like to thank Selina Meyer and Lisa Müller for their extensive contribution to this study. We thank Sonnhild Namingha for proofreading.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fraunhofer Institut für Experimentelles Software Engineering, Fraunhofer Platz 1, 67663, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Simon André Scherr, Frauke Neugebauer, Yannika Egler & Frank Elberzhager

Authors
  1. Simon André Scherr
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  2. Frauke Neugebauer
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  3. Yannika Egler
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  4. Frank Elberzhager
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simon André Scherr .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    Dr. Gabriele Meiselwitz

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Scherr, S.A., Neugebauer, F., Egler, Y., Elberzhager, F. (2021). The Presumed Happiness of the Smiling Pile of Poo – How Emojis are Perceived by People. In: Meiselwitz, G. (eds) Social Computing and Social Media: Experience Design and Social Network Analysis . HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12774. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77626-8_10

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