The merits of an emoji referral code | Hacker News Reader

The merits of an emoji referral code

medium.com

7 pointsdontmitch13 comments

Better is the enemy of good.

My grandma already has trouble finding characters like # on her keyboard, I can't wait till I have to spend time on the phone with her guiding her to the emoji she needs.

Does anyone know what the state is of screen readers, braille readers, and other accessibility tools when it comes to emoji?

I don't know the actual state of it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were easy for screen readers to interpret emoji, since you just have to have it read out the human-readable name accompanying the Unicode codepoint. You'd presumably get "for free" any new emoji that are added. </wild speculation>

You'd obviously want to limit the set of available emoji to avoid any ambiguities but assuming you do—is there anything stopping their use in frequent flier numbers, passwords, etc.?

And people can reliably enter them on all platforms. Oh, wait...

I guess if you only enter codes inside your app and you build an emoji-keyboard into the app it might work... ?

At this point, emoji support is almost ubiquitous (at least in the US). I'd imagine that within the next couple of years emoji support will be within a rounding error of 100%.

There's no obvious way to type emojis on Windows 10. Also, most emojis are almost unintelligible at small sizes because of the black and white font and faulty ClearType rendering.

Most emojis aren't even visible on Windows 7.

Great point. Typing emojis on non-mobile devices is a pain right now. Cmd+Ctrl+Space on Macs brings up an emoji-picker, but I doubt many people know that.

I guess this should be scoped to mobile-only applications. Web services can also use traditional referral links so a memorable referral code isn't as big of a UX win.

I think the idea is bad overall. Old versions of Android, still widespread, can't enter emoji either.

Best referral code I've seen is a phone number: that way you know it's not going to spread beyond the inner circle of family and friends of the referrer. (Unless you don't want that, of course.)

I thought "promo codes" referred here to the things you stuck at the end of URLs that took you to the app's install page—sort of like Amazon affiliate IDs. I find the idea that you'd be actively telling people your code, rather than e.g. typing their email address into the app to send them an "invite" link with the code embedded, kind of weird and unintuitive.

Using emojis to extend the available character set is taken off. Technologies like the QR code did not catch on partially because they were co-opted by marketers. Is it emojis turn?

http://emoticode.com/

The ideal referral code is a clickable link. It's the same reason domain names are fading: friction from issues like being too easy to mistype, hard to remember, scammers etc.

Most apps let you message or mail a referral link to a friend.

That doesn't work all that well on mobile apps, since users first have to download a new app before you can record the referral code. Having a link click persist through that process is nearly impossible.

Make the link go to a web page with a "download app" link -- the app can start and look for a cookie left by the web page.

Or simply download the app and click again.

I'm not saying not to have user-readable ref codes (though emojis are a terrible choice -- you can't read them aloud), I'm saying make typing them the very rare case.

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