Optimal Blog

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So what does it mean when that picture is forced to live in a predefined category?

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Q Walker, Experience Lead at PaperKite, a digital product/tech agency based in Wellington, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about Information Architecture (IA) and the world of emojis.

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In their talk, Q discusses how emoji IA reflects how humans make sense of a nuanced world. Through painstaking manual analysis of emojis across platforms, Q discovered the limitations of neatly defined categories. When it comes to IA, should one-size-fit-all?

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Background on Q Walker

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Q Walker (they/them) is the Experience Lead at PaperKite, a digital product/tech agency based in Wellington. Q passionately specializes in UX research and strategy and has never quite let go of their graphic design roots - which is a good thing, because they also lead a cross-disciplinary team of researchers, designers, and marketers. Q is also a musician, actor, public speaker, horror movie aficionado, tightwire walker, and avid gardener, and has been described as a walking exclamation point.

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Contact details

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Email address: q@paperkite.co.nz

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LinkedIn

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Emoji, those tiny digital icons that have become ubiquitous in our online conversations, play a significant role in enhancing our written communication. They add humor, nuance, clarity, and even a touch of mischief to our messages. However, behind the scenes, there is a complex system of information architecture (IA) that helps us navigate and utilize the vast array of over 3600 different emojis available today, each with its own variations in skin tone, gender, color, and more. In this exploration of emoji organization, Q Walker delves into the world of IA to understand how these expressive icons are categorized, and why it matters.

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Background and Research Goals 🥇

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This journey into emoji IA began as a personal curiosity for Q, initially observing how certain emojis seemed to shift between categories on different platforms, while others remained stable. For instance, emojis like the ‘lobster’ and ‘heart’ were found in various categories. This initial research aimed to understand why this inconsistency occurred across different platforms, whether it posed a problem for emoji IA, and whether it could (or should) be fixed. 

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The research evolved over time, incorporating emojis across platforms like Unicode, Apple, Slack, and others, which have slight variations in style and categorization. Emojis from each platform were organized and sorted (manually!) on a spreadsheet.

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Initial Findings: Explicit vs. Implicit Frameworks ୧⋆｡🩰✧

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The core finding of the research revolved around two prevailing emoji frameworks or categories: explicit and implicit. “Explicit” categorization is utilitarian, describing precisely what an emoji represents based on its visual elements. In contrast, “Implicit” categorization highlights the symbolic and contextual meanings of emojis, reflecting what they represent beyond their visual appearance.

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Two methods emerged to identify which framework, explicit or implicit, emoji fell into:

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• Contextual Examination: By observing where an emoji is placed within a platform's IA, we can determine whether it leans towards explicit or implicit categorization. For example, Apple categorizing ballet shoes under "activity/arts" reflects implicit categorization, while Unicode placing them in "shoes/footwear" represents explicit categorization.
• Name Analysis: Analyzing how emojis are named can reveal their intended meanings. For instance, the “red paper lantern” emoji is sub categorized as part of "light and light sources" within Unicode, but Apple refers to the same emoji as an "Izakaya lantern", attaching specific Japanese culture to the emoji. Therefore, the “red paper lantern” naming convention by Unicode would be classed as explicit, whereas Apple's “Izakaya lantern” would be classed as implicit.

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Even within these two prevailing frameworks, disagreements persist. For instance, the lobster emoji is categorized as "food" by some platforms and as "animal" or "nature" by others, showcasing discrepancies in explicit categorization. 

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Emoji Design and Presentation 🫠🤌🏻💗

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Emoji design is important, as it influences how users perceive and interpret them. For instance, the choice to depict a red lobster implies that lobster is categorized as “food” because lobsters are typically not red unless cooked. Another example is the “syringe” emoji, which is undergoing an evolution from a blood-filled needle, to something more generic with clear or no liquid. In this way, the syringe emoji has broader application to things like vaccination.

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This lack of standardization between platforms can be the cause of serious and unfortunate miscommunication! For example, the transformation of the gun emoji into a toy water pistol, despite its innocent appearance, still carries its historical baggage, as seen in its categorization within Apple’s IA near other weapons and dangerous objects. This highlights the messy and non-standard nature of emoji IA.

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Why it matters 🦞

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So, what do emojis teach us about information architecture? 

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Firstly, it teaches us to be flexible with how we navigate a multitude of data. With thousands of emojis and limited categories, finding the right emoji can be challenging.  Platforms have adopted various approaches to address this issue:

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• Recommendations: Many platforms offer personalized emoji recommendations based on frequency and recency of use. This feature simplifies emoji selection for users and streamlines navigation.
• Search Functionality: Some platforms incorporate a search bar, allowing users to quickly locate specific emojis. While this might be seen as a lazy solution, it proves practical in the context of emoji navigation.
• Ultra-customization: Slack, for example, takes customization a step further by allowing organizations to create their emoji categories. This results in a highly personalized experience for users.

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Secondly, it may be that a fully standardized framework for emoji categorization isn’t feasible or even desirable. Where IA would like us to neatly categorize an emoji as one thing, the reality is that they are nuanced and can have multiple meanings, making them difficult to fit into rigid categories -  just as ballet shoes can represent “shoes” (Unicode) and “art/entertainment” (Apple) simultaneously. Instead, we have the flexibility to categorize emojis based on what is most meaningful to their users. A standardized framework may not capture this complexity, and embracing the diversity of categorization enriches our understanding of human expression.

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The lobster emoji serves as a poignant example of how emoji can take on new meaning and human expression. A Unicode approval of the lobster emoji over the trans pride flag a few years ago highlighted issues of representation. This decision led to the adaptation of the lobster emoji as a symbol within the trans community, further demonstrating how meaning is adapted and attributed to emoji in many ways.

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Key takeaway 🥡

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Emoji IA is a testament to the diverse ways we make sense of our world and a reminder that often there are no limits to interpretation and creativity. As designers we should ask ourselves -  how do we ensure that our IA and products cater to our diverse reality?

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Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

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Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

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Jodine Stodart

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Many of us choose human centred design because we see it as an opportunity to have a positive impact on people's lives through the products and services we help create. Satisfying a need in us to do something good. Sometimes those good intentions can be thwarted by the many business and technical challenges that get in the way of delivering the product or service the way we originally intended it. 

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What if we are able to see the normal challenges of every design project and the relationships and tensions involved, as serving us and shaping us, to be better people? This is the essence of conscious design leadership.

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In this lunch and learn, find out what Conscious Design Leadership is and isn't, learn about the 'three lines of work', a key framework from regenerative design theory, and come away with some guides to practicing conscious leadership every day.

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Speaker Bio

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Currently in the role of Service Design Director at BNZ, Jodine also offers coaching and consulting services across a range of disciplines - UX research, service design and leadership through her business Fireside Consulting. Jodine is the cofounder of UXCONNECT, a monthly meet up online for leading designers and researchers in Aotearoa.

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View Jodine's slides here

I started at Optimal Workshop as CEO over a decade ago and in that time I have seen this company grow from humble beginnings in Wellington, into a globally recognized leader in the UX tools industry, with hundreds of thousands of users from some of the world’s most recognized brands. I am proud to have built an organization that is primed for the future. One that values its people, cares for its product, and loves its customers. 

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It’s been an incredible journey, but with growth comes change, and so, after 14 years, I’ve decided it’s time for me to step down. This has been an incredibly hard decision because I am still (and always will be) very excited about the future for Optimal Workshop. The momentum, creativity, and innovation that is flowing within the team assure me that the best is absolutely yet to come. Nonetheless, I feel that my part is now played and I’ve got another baby on the way. I’m very much looking forward to spending more time with family and friends while I take a break.

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I’d like to sincerely thank everyone who has been a part of this incredible journey, whether by advising, supplying, introducing, challenging, listening to or working, thinking and dreaming with me in my time here. Together, we've seen a tiny company flourish into a vibrant, resilient, and thriving organization on a shared mission to reinvent information architecture and help our customers create better experiences for everyone.

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Moving forward, we’re incredibly lucky that our original founder, Sam Ng has recently rejoined our board and it feels like we’ve come full circle and are ready for a new chapter with fresh leadership who are ready and empowered to focus on innovation and long-term growth. To that end, I am also thrilled to announce that Meiken Bassant now joins me as co-CEO for the next few weeks, and will step into an Acting CEO role once I leave. Her dedication, clarity, and ability to lead make her the perfect choice for this transition. I’ve never had more confidence in Optimal Workshop’s leadership, in all our people, and in our product, than I do today.

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I'll be at Optimal Workshop for a little while longer and welcome any conversations or thoughts you may wish to share with me, before and after that time of course.

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Thank you again to everyone who reads this, you’ve helped me more than you know and I appreciate it.

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With endless gratitude, 

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Andrew Mayfield 

We’re excited to share some new features and product updates that we've rolled out lately and what’s coming up next.

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What's new…

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Speeding up task analysis in Treejack 🚤

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Customer feedback and research have shown that users analyse results in Treejack in a task-by-task manner. To better support this way of working, we’ve updated Treejack results to ensure the success and directness of each task are easier to compare with the new Task overview tab in Results.  This new visualisation is available in Results > Overview> Task overview section in Optimal Workshop.

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Aggregate path views 

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We have also introduced the aggregate paths view in the Paths tab (it used to only be visible via the compare tasks button). This allows users to more easily see what the popular paths are for each task and how much each successful path was used (or not). 

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Over the next few months, we’ll continue working through our results tabs to update them to a task-by-task view and highlight insights at a task level. 

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Improving the quality of participant recruitment

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We’re continuing work to improve the quality of participants recruited in Optimal Workshop. Our latest release involves eliminating all participants that rush through a Treejack study.  We’ve analysed years of participants to get a good idea of what ‘rushing’ means, and we can now identify these ‘speeders’ and remove them from our participant pools. We have also removed the limit in-app for replacement participants across all study types, and released updates to immediately eliminate poor quality participants from custom orders. 

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Help guide: How to replace study participants in-app

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What’s next:

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• Identifying participants that rush through other tools and remove from participant pools.
• Build more automated flagging and behaviours to eliminate other behaviours that indicate poor-quality participants.
• Continued monitoring and analysis to ensure high participant quality.

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Templates are here 🙌 

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We are excited to announce our first six project templates are now available. Templates have been created with industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and back your results to make data-driven decisions.   These ready-made templates give you a headstart on your research by providing you with the right range of study types and when to use them. 

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Where will they live?

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Templates are accessible in the app from the Dashboard > Browse Templates. From the ‘templates menu’ select a template that matches your use case for example ‘I need to organise content into categories’ and get going faster than before. You can edit and customise the templates to suit your research goals. 

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More templates from our community

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This is just the beginning of our template journey and while we continue to build up our collection we’d love your input too. If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from we’d love to hear from you. Email us at product@optimalworkshop.com.

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What’s coming up…

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Optimal Academy 🎓

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The Optimal Academy is due to launch in later this month.  The Academy will provide education that enables our customers to get started faster with our tools and elevate their knowledge of all things Information Architecture and UX. 

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The first courses available will be a series of Optimal Workshop tool-based lessons, including best practice study setup analysis and recruitment.  You can expect to see more exclusive content and courses from industry experts and institutions on a diverse range of topics continuing to drop in 2023 and 2024.

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Enterprise team features

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We’re committed to making things easier for our team customers, particularly on the administration side of our product. Our product team have begun discovery on improving our administration features, and have had a lot of great customer feedback to help shape up the opportunities. We are aiming to make improvements to this area of the product later this year.

Simply put, ResearchOps is about making sure your research operations are robust, thought through and managed. 

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Having systems and processes around your UX research and your team keep everyone (and everything) organized. Making user research projects quicker to get started and more streamlined to run. And robust sharing, socializing, and knowledge storage means that everyone can understand the research insights and findings and put these to use - across the organization. And even better, find these when they need them. 

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Using the same tools across the team allows the research team to learn from each other, and previous research projects and be able to compare apples with apples, with everyone included. Bringing the team together across tools, research and results.

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We go into more detail in our ebook ResearchOps Checklist about exactly what you can do to make sure your research team is running at its best. Let’s take a quick look at 5 way to ensure you have the grounding for a successful ResearchOps team.

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1. Knowledge management 📚

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What do you do with all of the insights and findings of a user research project? How do you store them, how do you manage the insights, and how do you share and socialize?

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Having processes in place that manage this knowledge is important to the longevity of your research. From filing to sharing across platforms, it all needs to be standardized so everyone can search, find and share.

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2. Guidelines and process templates 📝

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Providing a framework for how to run research projects is are important. Building on the knowledge base from previous research can improve research efficiencies and cut down on groundwork and administration. Making research projects quicker and more streamlined to get underway.

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3. Governance 🏛

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User research is all about people, real people. It is incredibly important that any research be legal, safe, and ethical. Having effective governance covered is vital.

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4. Tool stack 🛠

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Every research team needs a ‘toolbox’ that they can use whenever they need to run card sorts, tree tests, usability tests, user interviews, and more. But which software and tools to use?

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Making sure that the team is using the same tools also helps with future research projects, learning from previous projects, and ensuring that the information is owned and run by the organization (rather than whichever individuals prefer). Reduce logins and password shares, and improve security with organization-wide tools and platforms. 

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5. Recruitment 👱🏻👩👩🏻👧🏽👧🏾

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Key to great UX research is the ability to recruit quality participants - fast! Having strong processes in place for screening, scheduling, sampling, incentivizing, and managing participants needs to be top of the list when organizing the team.

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Wrap Up 💥

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Each of these ResearchOps processes are not independent of the other. And neither do they flow from one to the other. They are part of a total wrap around for the research team, creating processes, systems and tools that are built to serve the team. Allowing them to focus on the job of doing great research and generating insights and findings that develop the very best user experience. 

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Afterall, we are creating user experiences that keep our users engaged and coming back. Why not look at the teams user experience and make the most of that. Freeing time and space to socialize and share the findings with the organization. 

What’s better than a UX team doing awesome research? A whole organization backing investment in UX research. What’s that look like in practice?  Collaboration and support from stakeholders across the organization throughout the research process from set up, doing studies, sharing insights, and digesting, understanding, and actioning recommendations based on the amazing insights you generate.

UX research should be something that is known, understood, and expected across your organization. Rather than keeping all the insight goodies to yourselves, why not democratize user research by making it accessible and shareable to all stakeholders to drive understanding of its value wherever they sit in the organization?

We go into this in more detail in our ebook UX Research for Teams. By including the stakeholders throughout the process, the role of research becomes a lot more visible throughout the organization. Having the best online tools to make the whole process simple and straightforward is a great place to start.

1. Who owns the research?

Recognition that the user research undertaken in your organization benefits the whole organization is essential for setting up key resources. By ensuring that everyone is operating from the same set of tools, the insights and results are easier to manage, find and file. It also means if someone leaves,  they don’t leave with all the insights and knowledge.

2. Everyone’s a researcher

Everyone within the organization should have the opportunity to be involved with UX research and should be encouraged to have a base understanding of the process (and even try out the tools) or, at the very least, have some understanding of the results and insights. If everyone has access to the tools, they can use these no matter where they sit in the organization. 

3. Don’t get distracted by shiny things

Maintaining a single source of research, with a well-organized filing system means you can always look at what has gone before. It is a great place to start. The best UX researchers often revisit past studies to see where to go from here. Creating consistency through the process and output means comparing insights are simpler.

4. Research is better with friends

What’s better than one mind? It’s two or more. Working alongside a team opens new perspectives, thinking, problem-solving, and approaches. New ways to see a problem and how to interpret insights and results. By socializing your results with the key stakeholders, you bring them on the journey, explaining how and why UX research is important to the project and the wider team. Firming up the opportunity for future research.

5. Qualitative research insights that are simple to find

Qualitative research tools are designed to assist you with testing types, including user interviews, contextual inquiries, and usability tests. Working as a team with tags, sorting, and recording can be made simple and streamlined. 

One of the best decisions you can make as a researcher is to bring the organization along for the ride. Setting up consistent tools across the team (and beyond) will help streamline research, making it simpler for all to be involved at each step of the process. Embedding UX research into each part of the organization. 

Take a look at our ebook UX Research for Teams, where we go into more detail.