Paying Bills With a Smile(y Face)

According to Adobe’s Future of Creativity 2022 report, in addition to being fun and playful, adults in the United States consider emojis to be useful for overcoming language barriers, for finding easier ways to express themselves, and that inclusive emojis can even help spark positive conversations about cultural and social issues. For something that at first glance seems a fairly superficial topic, it turns out the 21st century mode of communication can reveal much about how people perceive one another and how they want to be perceived themselves.

One of the questions the survey considered was how open U.S. adults are to using emojis for more practical tasks like confirming attendance to an event, using them when sending or receiving payments or even when communicating with a doctor to describe how they feel. As the following chart shows, younger users were far more likely to be open to all of these options. However, when asked about the idea of visiting a website address made of a string of emojis rather than a traditional URL, all generations were less convinced.

Adobe surveyed some 5,000 frequent emoji users across the states of California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas online between March 24 and April 18, 2022.