Rebuilding Twitter Emoji Finder UI

Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter’s Emoji search UI. As a coder, I simply enjoy thinking about how something can be improved. So there isn’t in particular anything wrong with it.

My Coding Books

First I want to show you finished version of Emoji finder I created. Then we’ll go over the problems that were solved. Is it perfect? Of course not. It might not be even better. But definitely different and has few advantages.

Here is an emoji finder UI I created in vanilla JavaScript with some CSS.

Vanilla implementation of Emoji Finder UI.

Twitter UI is great, however…few theoretical problems exist:

1. Hard to navigate between large groups of Emojis. Sometimes clicking on an emoji group tab doesn’t help me navigate to the Emoji I am thinking of — I still have to do lots of browsing just to find it once in a filter category.
2. Words don’t always match proper Emojis. Increasing vocabulary would be definitely one improvement. I type “stars” and single star emojis disappear…