Time to Smile: Emoji Support!

Today, we're happy to announce that Recollective now natively supports emoji and emoticons across the entire application. This is a benefit to both participants and study moderators when it comes to getting across meaning, feeling and personality.

Japanese for "picture word", Emoji are often pictographs—images of things like faces, weather, emotions or activities. They arrived on the scene in Japan long before they were popularized in North America via the smartphone. The humble emoticon :) is its predecessor.Both emoji and emoticons do one thing well, they express an emotion or idea succinctly. They've become part of the way we speak online and they aren't going away. You might be surprised to learn that there are several international Emoji standards for cross-device consistency. This is serious business.Today, we're happy to announce that Recollective now natively supports emoji and emoticons across the entire application. This is a benefit to both participants and study moderators when it comes to getting across meaning, feeling and personality.

How to Insert Emoji

There are a few ways to get emoji into Recollective...

From Mobile Devices

If you're on a device that supports emoji natively, there's nothing more to do than type using your built-in emoji keyboard. Recollective will now preserve the emoji characters so they're redisplayed perfectly throughout the application.On older mobile devices, you might need to add an emoji keyboard first via your device settings. If you're on a Mac, you can choose "Emoji & Symbols" in the Edit menu to get a graphical list of available icons.

From a Desktop Browser

On a desktop browser, within Recollective's formatted-text editor, we've added a menu system that will help you pick the most appropriate emoji. Just type the colon character ( : ), as if you're about to insert an emoticon. A menu will appear like the one shown below.

Once the menu appears, you can actually keep typing as a way to search the available icons (e.g. "sad" in the example above). You can use your down-arrow key to select the one you want and then press ENTER. You can use your mouse to make a selection as well.To make the emoticon larger, just increase the font size of the entire paragraph or just the spaces surrounding the icon.Note that the keywords shown between the colons like :cry: are actually standardized emoji "short codes". One downside is that these short codes are in English only.

Using Emoticons and Short Codes

An easy way to insert a graphical emoji is to type simple emoticons like :) or >:( followed by a blank space. Recollective will now automagically convert them to the matching emoticons.

Even in areas that lack visual text formatting (e.g. Study Overview subject line, task comment, photo annotations, activity names, etc.), you can still use emoticons or the emoji short codes and we'll convert them everywhere they're shown!You can even use emoji in your email broadcasts and Recollective will format them accordingly. It's up to you now to go emoji crazy or use them sparingly. You may have a hard time holding back given the immense icon choice now at your disposal. I've already updated my sample Study Overview...

Philippe Dame
Co-Founder & CPO

Let's research happy together