I will never ‘Thumbs Up’ again!

Before reading this, please bring your mobile phone if you are not already on it. Believe me, it is very hard to follow up without having a mobile phone and without a list of some of these apps: Twitter, Facebook, Viber and Hangouts.

I am a heavy user of these four apps beside some others of course, and despite the fact that I have been using these apps for years, I have only noticed this thing a week ago.

Have you heard before about ‘Emoticons’? These beautiful and expressive emotions which we send while typing to convey our feeling or mood. Have you ever sent a ‘thumbs up’ before? What a silly question! Let’s rephrase it .. Have you sent more than 100 ‘thumbs up’ before? If yes, most probably you will be puzzled as much as I do with the anomaly I found, you may blame me for being picky or you can simply make my life better and easier by giving me an explanation!

This is the list of ‘Thumbs Up’ emoticons across different apps and platforms:

Have you noticed something? Have you noted the any difference in ‘Microsoft’, ‘Viber’ and ‘Google’ ones? Their emoticons are different from the rest of other apps/platforms and yet I found them the most closer to reality. Have you figured it out yet? ‘Yes’ thumbs up on ‘Viber’, ‘Google’ and ‘Microsoft’ is right-handed while it is left-handed in any other app I have used including the ones above!

You may think this is a very silly difference and there is no point of discussing it. Well, may I say: “BIG NO!”. As a software engineer and a product owner who loves building and using products, I usually ask myself a lot and put myself into the user shoes. In this case, I am actually the user himself! How could I not understand such difference? I have googled for more than an hour and never found anyone who raised this question before, so it either may be stupid enough not to figure out the ‘WHY’ myself or this is really something with no explanation till now.

I encourage you all to think about it with me and try to come up with your thoughts about this matter and also to ask yourselves whether you ‘Thumbs Up’ with your left or right hand. Till then, I will never ‘Thumbs Up’ again!

Happy Chatting!