EmojiZoom is a novel emoji entry method for mobile devices built around zooming interaction. Developed by the Human-Computer Interaction group at the University of Hannover.
With EmojiZoom, you no longer scroll through many pages of emoji to look for the one you want. Instead, we show you all emoji at once. Of course, it would be hard to pick an emoji in this zoomed out view. But by tapping on the screen you can zoom in to that point and then select an emoji from this view. You can also use pinch gestures to zoom in or out as much as you want. You'll soon remember the general area where your favorite emoji can be found. This makes entering them very easy and fast.
If you just want to browse all available emoji, just zoom in a bit and scroll through all of them at once. You'll notice how related ones are close together. Drag on the screen to move around and explore the emoji.
Note that emoji availability and style vary depending on your device. We show you all emoji supported on your device, but your view might differ from the preview shown on the left.
Enter emoji much faster than with other emoji keyboards. Novice users were 18% faster with EmojiZoom than with the Google keyboard. Over time, entering emoji gets even faster.
Searching through pages of emoji does not work well. EmojiZoom shows you all emoji at once. Zoom in a bit and take a look at large swaths of emoji at once.
EmojiZoom is based on recent research on emoji entry. While using EmojiZoom, you can also contribute to our ongoing research on emoji entry.
In a user study we compared EmojiZoom with the default Google keyboard. We saw an 18% improvement in emoji entry speed for novice users.
While we already saw an 18% improvement for novice users, longer use of EmojiZoom resulted in even better emoji entry performance. As you can see here, all three users cut their emoji entry times by almost 50% after a short period of use. Our longest running test user cut his emoji entry time from about 15s down to below 6s.
EmojiZoom is developed by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the University of Hannover. For additional details, see our MobileHCI 2016 paper on EmojiZoom (available on our homepage or in the ACM digital library). For inquiries, please contact henning.pohl@hci.uni-hannover.de or dennis.stanke@hci.uni-hannover.de.