Abstract

Emoji provide a way to express nonverbal conversational cues in computer-mediated communication. However, people need to share the same understanding of what each emoji symbolises, otherwise communication can breakdown. We surveyed 436 people about their use of emoji and ran an interactive study using a two-dimensional emotion space to investigate (1) the variation in people’s interpretation of emoji and (2) their interpretation of corresponding Android and iOS emoji. Our results show variations between people’s ratings within and across platforms. We outline our solution to reduce misunderstandings that arise from different interpretations of emoji.