4 ms·

I can’t trust this article and instantly turned off by the excessive use of Emojis. You might argue - what’s the problem? I’d say, what’s the need! Do they add

I can’t trust this article and instantly turned off by the excessive use of Emojis. You might argue - what’s the problem? I’d say, what’s the need! Do they add any value? Why combine semiological characters with an otherwise perfectly fine and widely accepted English orthography? Are they accessible? Is there a emotion being conveyed? Why add cognitive load? Is the design severely broken or dysfunctional without Emojis? Are you able to write well and convincingly without using Emojis as a crutch? Is there an ambiguity where emotional importance can make or break the central arguments being presented in text?

tgv 6y ago
> You might argue - what’s the problem? Bad design, that's the problem. It severely hinders reading.
sbuk 6y ago
Perhaps you're not a visual person. Words are great, but attention is finite and conveying meaning and nuance solely using the written word is hard (see Hacker News comments generally - mine included!). Pictograms, diagrams and even emoji's if used well can convey more with less. This site is perhaps a bit over the top, but (at time of writing) 1/4 of the comments are positive, so it's clearly of value to some (one is questioning the validity of UX, the other is just an opinion).
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  To conclude that pictograms are useless from my comment is not reading it incorrectly. Pictograms are incredibly useful in everyday life - from road signs to warning labels. A good book on this topic is Semiology of Graphics by Jacques Berkin and the classic 1936 book on International Pictographical Language which is what ISO 7001 standard is based on. To clarify again, I do not at all mean that pictograms are useless. Emojis are very useful in conveying emotions. Adding them as bullet points is decoration. I like Emojis in conversations and instant messages. I suggest reading long forms of text with emojis, I think they're an impedence. If I were to put a bet, Emojis mixed in long form articles would be severely more difficult to read in an objective pyschology test - I am a very visual person for the record but I find this term off-putting.
lstamour 6y ago
So I tried it. I combined https://stackoverflow.com/a/64084994 https://stackoverflow.com/a/64084994 for emoji detection with https://stackoverflow.com/a/25578365 https://stackoverflow.com/a/25578365 to loop through the page and remove them. The result was an emoji removal script I could easily paste into Web Inspector's console tab to remove all the emojis: https://gist.github.com/LouisStAmour/e067d5b7adc0fb7c19f1a56ec453e1b2 https://gist.github.com/LouisStAmour/e067d5b7adc0fb7c19f1a56... (click "Raw" for easiest copy-paste) Right away, the headings and list at the top of the page are much more readable. I find myself anchoring not to the emoji but to the actual headings on the page, like "Meaning". But then we've the list, with all those circles that used to contain emoji... If you want to remove the circles, use: document.querySelectorAll('.rll-bias__icon__wrapper').forEach(x => x.parentElement.removeChild(x)) And then adjust the padding left: .type-post .post-content .rll-bias__container { padding-left: 30px } Having done the last CSS tweak above, the first thing I notice is that a lot of the checklists are in a "Coming Soon" state and feel less overwhelmed by the visual icons, but more overwhelmed by the length of the lists. The lists, on the other hand, immediately feel less visually approachable because my mind is asking for simple visual examples of each, but those aren't present until I click, at best. It's interesting. To me, the emojis add an artificial sense of "completeness" to the page that make the page visually rich but don't necessarily add to the experience as much as creating new visualizations for each list item would. And they obscure how much of the list isn't finished yet, in terms of having examples and a detailed explanation. But reading the list with emojis, there is definite value, especially because it has me questioning what each emoji means to the list item. Some of them seem very literal to the point where they're not helpful - some distort the meaning, such as "Framing" or "Contrast" whose emojis represent a different use of the word (a picture frame vs framing an argument; happy/sad extremes vs isolating an element to draw attention to it). And I can't download the cheat sheet without turning off my adblocker/tracking protections, it seems. The more I read the page without emojis the more I realize, it's a list of definitions. One could imagine this alphabetically sorted at the back of a book on this topic. Useful? Yes. But easy to apply? Not really. If these were cards or checklists or if I could swipe through, see a random example, and remind myself of how I could creatively one of these principles to a problem at hand, I think I'd find these very useful. Alternatively, I could see myself looking over an entire site and asking myself, for each of these principles, where it might be useful or violated in a current design, then marking comments for future improvements. Thinking about it without examples makes it feel too much like a flash card memory quiz. Quick, what's the "Von Restorff Effect"?! It's a bit mentally taxing. :D It's only when you expand and add examples that I feel I've enough context to remember more than just the name of something.

tgv 6y ago

> You might argue - what’s the problem? Bad design, that's the problem. It severely hinders reading.

sbuk 6y ago

Perhaps you're not a visual person. Words are great, but attention is finite and conveying meaning and nuance solely using the written word is hard (see Hacker News comments generally - mine included!). Pictograms, diagrams and even emoji's if used well can convey more with less. This site is perhaps a bit over the top, but (at time of writing) 1/4 of the comments are positive, so it's clearly of value to some (one is questioning the validity of UX, the other is just an opinion).

systemvoltage 6y ago
To conclude that pictograms are useless from my comment is not reading it incorrectly. Pictograms are incredibly useful in everyday life - from road signs to warning labels. A good book on this topic is Semiology of Graphics by Jacques Berkin and the classic 1936 book on International Pictographical Language which is what ISO 7001 standard is based on. To clarify again, I do not at all mean that pictograms are useless. Emojis are very useful in conveying emotions. Adding them as bullet points is decoration. I like Emojis in conversations and instant messages. I suggest reading long forms of text with emojis, I think they're an impedence. If I were to put a bet, Emojis mixed in long form articles would be severely more difficult to read in an objective pyschology test - I am a very visual person for the record but I find this term off-putting.

lstamour 6y ago

So I tried it. I combined https://stackoverflow.com/a/64084994 https://stackoverflow.com/a/64084994 for emoji detection with https://stackoverflow.com/a/25578365 https://stackoverflow.com/a/25578365 to loop through the page and remove them. The result was an emoji removal script I could easily paste into Web Inspector's console tab to remove all the emojis: https://gist.github.com/LouisStAmour/e067d5b7adc0fb7c19f1a56ec453e1b2 https://gist.github.com/LouisStAmour/e067d5b7adc0fb7c19f1a56... (click "Raw" for easiest copy-paste) Right away, the headings and list at the top of the page are much more readable. I find myself anchoring not to the emoji but to the actual headings on the page, like "Meaning". But then we've the list, with all those circles that used to contain emoji... If you want to remove the circles, use: document.querySelectorAll('.rll-bias__icon__wrapper').forEach(x => x.parentElement.removeChild(x)) And then adjust the padding left: .type-post .post-content .rll-bias__container { padding-left: 30px } Having done the last CSS tweak above, the first thing I notice is that a lot of the checklists are in a "Coming Soon" state and feel less overwhelmed by the visual icons, but more overwhelmed by the length of the lists. The lists, on the other hand, immediately feel less visually approachable because my mind is asking for simple visual examples of each, but those aren't present until I click, at best. It's interesting. To me, the emojis add an artificial sense of "completeness" to the page that make the page visually rich but don't necessarily add to the experience as much as creating new visualizations for each list item would. And they obscure how much of the list isn't finished yet, in terms of having examples and a detailed explanation. But reading the list with emojis, there is definite value, especially because it has me questioning what each emoji means to the list item. Some of them seem very literal to the point where they're not helpful - some distort the meaning, such as "Framing" or "Contrast" whose emojis represent a different use of the word (a picture frame vs framing an argument; happy/sad extremes vs isolating an element to draw attention to it). And I can't download the cheat sheet without turning off my adblocker/tracking protections, it seems. The more I read the page without emojis the more I realize, it's a list of definitions. One could imagine this alphabetically sorted at the back of a book on this topic. Useful? Yes. But easy to apply? Not really. If these were cards or checklists or if I could swipe through, see a random example, and remind myself of how I could creatively one of these principles to a problem at hand, I think I'd find these very useful. Alternatively, I could see myself looking over an entire site and asking myself, for each of these principles, where it might be useful or violated in a current design, then marking comments for future improvements. Thinking about it without examples makes it feel too much like a flash card memory quiz. Quick, what's the "Von Restorff Effect"?! It's a bit mentally taxing. :D It's only when you expand and add examples that I feel I've enough context to remember more than just the name of something.