Emotype: Expressing emotions by changing typeface in mobile messenger texting

Instant messaging is a popular form of text-based communication. However, text-based messaging lacks the ability to communicate nonverbal information such as that conveyed through facial expressions and voice tones, although a multitude of emotions may underlie the text of a conversation between participants. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses typefaces to communicate emotions. We investigated which typefaces are useful for delivering emotions and introduced these typefaces into a mobile chat app. We conducted a survey to demonstrate how changes in the typeface of a message affected the meaning of the message conveyed. Our user study provides an understanding of the actual user experience with the application. The results show that the use of multiple typefaces in a message can affect and intensify the valence received by users and the use of multiple typefaces elicited an active response and brought about a livelier mood during texting.