Visual-Textual Integration: Emoji as a Supplement in Health Information Design

Tingyi S. Lin, Yue Luo

The growing popularity of emoji has drawn attention to social media interactions, including within the context of health information. This study explored and analyzed the usage patterns of emoji in relation to health information by arranging a focus group and conducting a design experiment. To this end, we created a micro-database of 69 health-themed emoji representing various parts of speech; specifically, they could function as nouns, verbs, and adjectives simultaneously. An information design experiment was conducted to investigate how emoji could be used as a visual language to assist in the design and communication of health information. Our analysis yielded several important findings, including (1) recommendations regarding the quantity, frequency, and placement of emoji in health information; (2) an examination of the denotative aspects of emoji–word integration in visual language; and (3) the strategic positioning of emoji within appropriate sentence components, with an emphasis on the judicious use of repeated emoji to create or enhance visual hierarchies. This exploratory study constitutes a first step in understanding the design application paradigms of emoji in health communication and provides nuanced theoretical insights into visual health communication as well as practical implications for information design.