Redesigning Android Emoji – Google Design | Hacker News Reader

Redesigning Android Emoji – Google Design

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22 pointstwapi10 comments

I am a big fan of the blob emojis from Android 5.0. They are very opinionated and because of that I think they were amazing at conveying emotions. To me it always seemed like the blobs had their own character and role they played. Another thing I loved about the blobs was the consistent neutrality. Gender, color, social standing didn't matter at all. They were just blob people, doing what blob people do, display emotion and context.

In my opinion the evolution of the emojis has taken a fundamentally wrong turn. The introduction of skin, hair color variations, genders, granular selections in things like a family setup and mixing in humans is, in my view, fundamentally wrong.

To me the simplicity of the emojis were their main strength. You want family? Sure, family emoji. But now you have to select genders of parents, numbers of kids, etc. I think this guides the users into the wrong direction to convey a completely different meaning.

Maybe helping the user identify with the emojis more is a goal that people want to reach? I certainly don't. My emotions and context may be culturally flavored but otherwise quite universal and I think emojis should be the same.

I don't care for the gendered/colored emojis, some people want them, I ignore them, everyone is happy.

But I really don't understand replacing the blobs with yet another boring variation of Apple emojis, like Twitter, FB, Samsung, ... I'm also a big fan and I believe it's a unique feature that makes Android stand out (even before KitKat, the green droids were pretty fun). I always found Android apps that embed Apple emojis infuriating, but now everyone will get ugly emojis, I guess it solves the problem.

Regardless of what platform you're on, you want your emoji to be similar enough to those of other platforms so that intent and meaning are transmitted accurately. This is one of the problems with emoji overall - they specify very approximately what visual each keycode should correspond to, which means that you could have two valid implementations that result in very confusing / inaccurate communication between users on each platform, since they're sending one thing and the other side is seeing something quite different.

That is not a problem unique to Emojis though. Some people construct multi-symbol things that would make a screen-reader call them what they are instead of what they "mean". Take for example the shrugging man made up of slashes, with a Japanese hiragana right in the middle of it!

It is a fundamentally wrong assumption that Unicode made: they thought if a code existed for everything, people would always use the code they are supposed to use. In reality, people seem more likely to choose symbols based on what each symbol looks like, and make their own composed "words". You practically need machine learning to correctly decipher what each string of symbols really "means".

As a user of both macOS and Android, using Android's emoji was very confusing at the beginning.

This is mainly because Whatsapp (where I use them the most) always use Apple's, so I couldn't even figure out why sometimes I'd see the blobs.

Both Apple's and the new emoji are 1000% times better-looking than the old ones, in my opinion.

The problem with the previous blob emoji was that they weren't as neutral as you think. [0] For example, Information Desk Person all the way to the right in this image [1] is obviously a woman. The second emoji with dancing has a rose in its mouth, which is more often associated with men than women. Even the police officer to the left looks more like a man due to lack of feminine features. There are a lot of culture nuances you might not notice that will make people feel alienated, like gay men wanting men in leotards dancing. You can find issues with a lot of the old emoji and a big factor mentioned in this post was a loss of consistency. Not everyone views yellow skin as color-neutral, but rather as a default for white; many people would rather have emoji that match their own skin color. Lastly, emoji were culturally specific from the outset by virtue of originating from Japan so your whole premise is flawed.

[0]: http://blog.emojipedia.org/android-7-1-emoji-changelog/#whyg... [1]: http://blog.emojipedia.org/content/images/2016/10/android-7-...

Culturally flavoured emojis are not problem. There will always be gestures, context, emotions which differ greatly between different parts of the world. I don't have a problem with that. As you said, the emojis come from japan and there are some emojis I seldom use because I have no cultural need for them. I think this is different from skin/hair color and gender and actually contributes meaningfully to the conversation. "Blob kneeling to beg for forgiveness" might not be used where I live but contributes just as much as a "shrug" which I use more often but does not get used in japan.

My main point is that it does not contribute anything meaningful, or in my opinion can even be counterproductive, to explicitly express "brown colored, female thumbs up" instead of a more neutral "thumbs up".

I see your point that there are some emojis where might be too stereotyped even in the blob form and that there are already many preconceptions about how some blobs are understood. The police officer blob or the flight attendant blob are good examples. That yellow skin is considered a default for white or that people automatically see a blob with a police hat as male is a difficult subject and I'm unsure how to solve this perfectly in a general way.

It is in no way perfect, yes, but I argue that it's a better direction than going the other way by introducing more and more ways to individualise them.

> ... mixing in humans is, in my view, fundamentally wrong.

The humans were part of the original emoji on Japanese handsets, so in order for unicode to be compatible with a very large, existing text-base, they had to include people when their incorporated emoji.

So mixing in humans isn't a wrong turn, it has always been there.

The previous emoji were almost uniformly better looking. It's a shame - they were one of my favorite features of Android.

Shit, the new ones look bad. It's almost as if they were designed by Samsung.

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