Google And Apple, We Need To Talk About Your Emojis
Research shows that varying emojis may be to blame for miscommunication woes.
I recently discovered that I've been sending *wildly* different emojis to my Android friends.
I thought I was texting, HAY LET'S GO OUT :and danse:...
...when it was really more like HAY LET'S GO OUT :can I court you: (on Android) or even more terrifyingly, HAY LET'S GO OUT :I'm a preteen: (on Samsung).
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed / Emojipedia
A new paper has shown that people interpret an emoji's meaning in a variety of ways, in part because emojis look so different across platforms.
Group Lens / Via grouplens.org
The paper's co-author, Hannah Miller, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota, and her team asked 304 people how they felt about different emojis.
"We asked [the participants] to rate 15 emoji renderings on sentiment, from strongly negative to strongly positive, whether it was angry or said, happy or excited," Miller told BuzzFeed.
"The study was inspired by some personal experiences," Miller said. "This particular topic came from the fact that if I wrote something on my phone or browser, I saw different emoji each time I looked."
Hannah Miller
One emoji, "grinning face with smiling eyes," is particularly ambiguous.
The paper, which will be published by AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in May, revealed that users saw the Google version of the emoji as "'blissfully happy' while the exact same Unicode character, but rendered for Apple, was described as 'ready to fight.'"
Group Lens / Via grouplens.org