With an appealing form and a straightforward encoding of information, wordle, or word cloud, stays popular among the public to present a summary of the text. Inspired by the success of animated text in the film industry, we explore to enhance the communication of emotional context of wordle using animation. To inform our design, we first review a variety of animated text designs in the wild and summarize a design space for animated wordle. Then we conduct a preliminary study on initial designs of the animated wordle and identify two potential factors that link animation with emotion: entropy (randomness) and playing speed. Working with designers, we present four animated schemes in line with the two factors and validate the designs in a crowdsourcing study. A prototype system is provide...[ Read more ]

With an appealing form and a straightforward encoding of information, wordle, or word cloud, stays popular among the public to present a summary of the text. Inspired by the success of animated text in the film industry, we explore to enhance the communication of emotional context of wordle using animation. To inform our design, we first review a variety of animated text designs in the wild and summarize a design space for animated wordle. Then we conduct a preliminary study on initial designs of the animated wordle and identify two potential factors that link animation with emotion: entropy (randomness) and playing speed. Working with designers, we present four animated schemes in line with the two factors and validate the designs in a crowdsourcing study. A prototype system is provided as a demonstration of a potential application of our findings, enabling fast generation of an “emordle”, an abbreviation for “animated emotional wordle”, from a static wordle. In the following interviewed-based usability study, users are generally satisfied with the tool expressiveness and its convenience. We conclude with implications from our user study and a discussion of future directions for integrating emotion with data-powered narration.