• Overview

“Umoji is an application designed to allow users to personalize and share their emoticons by using themselves as the emoticons. The main purpose of the application is to create their own custom Umoji.”

• Insperation & Abstract

Selfies have become amazingly popular in the world. The top ten hashtags on Instagram all include some form of selfie, and #selfie is the most popular hashtag, with over 34 million photos attached to it. Because of this wave of popularity, an app like Umoji will be wildly successful. It allows users to show off their selfies in a brand new way-- through text messaging. Not only that, but it will be a non-obtrusive way for users to integrate their selfies into every day communication by making it into an emoji, something that people already use. Combining three of the most popular forms of communication (selfies, text message and emojis) will draw in users and get them making hundreds of unique emoticons. Not only that, but with the ability to share their emoticons, users can allow their friends to use their custom emojis. It's a simple, clean, and easy-to-use app that will make an impersonal for of communication a little more personal.

My personal interest in this kind of app comes from the way I share my own photos. I usually use Path or Facebook when I want to share my photos. I also use text messaging a lot, but I think that texting is sort of boring the way it is. There are the standard emojis, LoLs, and other things, but I am looking for something new. There are many apps that are similar to mine, but nothing that does exactly what I want. I want to be able to put my face in a text message in place of the usual emoticons. Aside from my personal wants, I think that an app like this would be very successful.