Atlassian - HipChat
Emoji Refresh
Created by First Person for Atlassian.
Emojis have become part of our daily lexicon. From casual chats to business communication, you find emojis sneaking into all forms of messenger communications.
Through research, testing and implementation, First Person worked hard to keep the fun and cheeky side of the emojis while making new and usable communication tools. It was an exciting and fun project that was filled with bad jokes and 100's of sketches resulting in really fun emojis.
Creative Director - Nathan Hackett
Art Director - KK Lin
Account Manager - Brandon Grande
Project Manager - Meg Underwood
User Experience Research
Emojis are a great form of communication, but to be successful, people must be not only be able to instantly understand them, but also want to use them. In order to figure out how to improve and create new emojis, we had to learn about HipChat and its users, asking questions like: Who are the HipChat users? What do they use HipChat for? What do they say to each other? And what do they want in order to be a able to communicate more effectively? We conducted a brief survey to find these answers.
We also conducted a heuristic assessment of the HipChat app, where we found specific types of emojis already formed natural groups such as cartoons, memes, and floating heads. We also noticed that searching for an appropriate emoji to use was difficult due to lack of categorization within the app. The biggest observation was noticing an opportunity to introduce the idea of team-based groupings, so the people who use HipChat the most could find and use emojis specific to their needs. With results of the survey and assessment in hand, we worked with Atlassian to define five key user groups to create new icons for: DevOps, Finance, HR, Legal, and IT. But we also created some fun, general emojis for everyday conversation so that the new library wasn’t completely work specific.
Piggy Bank
Cool Beans
The Results - Over 100 New Emojis
Using all our gathered knowledge, the First Person team brainstormed puns and sketched out emoji ideas to test with the Atlassian team. We wanted to make sure the emojis we designed were still fun, useable, and personal. We wanted to make sure they were still Hip!
In total, we created over 100 emojis—ranging from work specific, to puns that made people smile. We’re excited to see how more users will respond to them and integrate them into their daily communications on HipChat.