Defining guidance for emoji usage across five products
Equipping +800 Intuit designers with accessible, inclusive guidance for using emoji in marketing and product experiences.
Company
Intuit Design System
Timeline
3 months
Role
Lead Content Strategist
Outcome
Established durable guidance for +300 content designers and +800 product designers across Intuit’s five products. Raised the bar for accessibility and inclusivity within Intuit's design system and beyond.
Summary
For a large, multi-product company like Intuit, having guidelines for emoji usage within their design system is crucial to ensure consistency, enhance communication clarity, and maintain brand integrity. Clear guidelines help create a unified visual language across all platforms, prevent misinterpretation, and support a professional image, ultimately contributing to a better user experience and fostering trust with customers. I drove a team of 14 designers to create emoji guidance for the public-facing Intuit content design system site, a leading site in the design industry.
Research
Industry standards
How do other companies use emoji? What companies create their own emoji?
Legality
What’s doable from a legal standpoint? Are emoji really under copyright?
Accessibility
How do screen readers read emojis? Can you start a sentence with an emoji?
User interviews
What value does this bring our users? How many emoji are too many? Which emoji are off limits for certain contexts?
Inclusivity
What cultural contexts exist across all emoji variations? How do these change within various geographies?
Objectives
• Conduct an audit of current emoji usage
• Establish design principles that align with the voice and tone of each Intuit product
• Pressure test emoji guidance, create examples that are empowering, not prescriptive
• Socialize guidance with designers at Intuit and beyond
Defining the problem
Intuit's design system did not have any guidance for emoji usage, which resulted in incongruent experiences across Intuit's 5 products.
User problem
There was no source of truth for designers to turn to when creating new experiences for Intuit customers. Designers across Intuit's five products—QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mailchimp, CreditKarma, and Mint—had no way of knowing if they were using emoji in a consistent, accurate, inclusive, and accessible way.
Business problem
The lack of consistency and accuracy decreased user confidence and negatively impacted trust in our products. The lack of inclusivity and accessibility contradicted Intuit’s values.
Explorations
We iterated on numerous information architecture frameworks. Our process looked like this:
•Team working sessions
•Independent testing
•Share and iterate
•Repeat
Solution
An addition to Intuit's content design system dedicated to emoji usage, including:
•When to use emoji
•Best practices
•Examples
•Resources
Check it out for yourself at Intuit’s content design site.
Outcome
Established durable guidance for +300 content designers and +800 product designers at Intuit. Raised the bar for accessibility and inclusivity within Intuit's design system and beyond.