Emojify Everything

Personalized, contextualized emojis that show who you are, in every situation. With Emojiface, you get your own custom emojis you use from a keyboard in any chat!

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Emojiface needed a new user onboarding, a new tutorial for how to use the product that really showed people how awesome (and easy!) it is to emojify themselves with new facial recognition technology. Quantitatively, our task was to increase the number of people who successfully created their first Emojiface emoji.

We began by examining the current onboarding experience, where it was succeeding and where it was failing. We watched as all kinds of users played with the app, looking at each step for their emotions–excitement, frustration, confusion, boredom, surprise, joy.

Emojiface had some powerful facial recognition technology, but adjusting facial features to design a custom emoji was still a confusing process that required some complex on-screen controls.

Recognizing that such complicated controls quickly lead to frustration, which quickly leads to users bailing from the app, we prioritized improving the interface in this core area of the emoji-creation experience.

Our solution for increasing engagement with the emoji-creation screens:

1.Maximize for natural hand motion.
2.Remove unnecesary elements.
3.Bring in the fun of Emojiface as early as possible. Emojify ASAP!

Essentially, our goal was to make it easier to access the fun of Emojiface!

To kick this off, we engaged in rigorous user experience testing in order to identify redundancies and optimize for flow. We began implementing the facial recognition with emoji overlay that instantaneously elicited a positive user response and finally focused on the fun elements. For the final fun component we drew inspiration from video game character creation – where we’ve seen people spend hours getting their avatars “just right”.

Using facial recognition did not come without its challenges. It was slow on older devices, presented problems in working with facial features reliably across all faces, and finally we ran into issues with photo quality while using the facial recognition API. With a lot of tweaking, we were able to get the tech to be performant with all kinds of faces. And in order to solve the issues with quality we changed photo to be taken by the camera controller rather than the video one used by the facial recognition API.

GOING FORWARD

Emojiface has been featured in online magazines such as, Design Taxi, Style caster, iDigitalTimes, and a number of others. The team has just partnered with one of the largest major U.S.-based mobile operators. We continue to work with Emojiface, providing ongoing design services for the app, as well as the company’s marketing, current photobooth integration project, and more.