  Emoticons are indispensable in online communications. With users' growing
needs for more customized and expressive emoticons, recent messaging
applications begin to support (limited) multi-modal emoticons: e.g., enhancing
emoticons with animations or vibrotactile feedback. However, little empirical
knowledge has been accumulated concerning how people create, share and
experience multi-modal emoticons in everyday communication, and how to better
support them through design. To tackle this, we developed VibEmoji, a
user-authoring multi-modal emoticon interface for mobile messaging. Extending
existing designs, VibEmoji grants users greater flexibility to combine various
emoticons, vibrations, and animations on-the-fly, and offers non-aggressive
recommendations based on these components' emotional relevance. Using VibEmoji
as a probe, we conducted a four-week field study with 20 participants, to gain
new understandings from in-the-wild usage and experience, and extract
implications for design. We thereby contribute both a novel system and various
insights for supporting users' creation and communication of multi-modal
emoticons.
