At i.DO, there are two things we are very passionate about: Asana and emojis.
We use emojis for a lot of things. We even have a complete glossary of approved emojis for internal use, each with a very specific meaning. And yes, we are strict about them.
For us, emojis bring color, they bring fun, but they also allow us to standardize and convey very specific information. For example, we have an emoji for meetings, one for quotes, one for invoices. If a task represents an invoice, the title doesn’t need the word “invoice.” It just needs the right emoji. Same for meetings. You’ll never see a task titled “meeting about X.” It’s simply the meeting emoji plus whatever the meeting is about.
We have emojis for concepts, objects, even teams. Around 30 in total, each tied to something specific. And we believe this is a key element of how we work every day.
One caveat to consider though from an accessibility standpoint: An overuse of emoji’s can be quite frustrating for people that have a visual disability and using screen readers.
This may be something to take into consideration, especially for larger organisations.
We have started to look into using emojis and got a bit stuck on what the most useful way would be. I like the idea of using them to abbreviate the titles and tie them more clearly to different areas! How they are read out on screen-readers is definitely something to look at more closely, but I am wondering whether there is a way to use that for advantage as well. For example, I noticed that the standard screen reader on the Edge browser does not state the column name “Tags” when reading out the tags of a task on Asana, so emojis with clear definitions could potentially be used to make it clearer.
Does Asana support the use of custom emojis like Slack does? Because we have a bunch of internal-use emojis that came from https://emojikitchen.dev/ which is arguably more fun than we should be allowed to have!
Personally, I’m not a fan of emojis in most instances as I find them distracting. The exception is in comments–they can be useful when communicating back and forth between collaborators or the assignee.
