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Tobias Seitz, Florian Mathis, Heinrich Hussmann
The Bird is the Word: A Usability Evaluation of Emojis inside Text Passwords
In Proceedings of the 29th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Brisbane, QLD, Australia (bib)

Passwords still represent an annoying burden for millions of Internet users. Helping people create memorable and secure credentials is therefore an important goal for web-service providers to satisfy user needs. Due to the good memorability of pictures, emojis may be a suitable tool to create memorable and secure passwords. These small pictograms have seen an enormous rise in recent years, but their usage in regular passwords has not been explored for the Web. In a two-part user study with 40 participants we investigated if and how emojis are suitable in this context. We asked users to create passwords that contained both regular alphanumeric characters and emojis. The study shows that users' primary selection strategy was to create meaningful relationships between the emoji and the rest of the password. We also found that platform dependent renderings of emojis do not necessarily reduce usability, if the object represented by the emoji is distinctive enough. As websites are already starting to allow emojis in passwords, it is important to evaluate this step carefully. Our results can inform this decision and provide pointers to the usability implications.