Do you applaud the written word?

Hearts to Applauses

Plexus Design
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read

Medium has been making a few changes recently. Apart from the redesigned logo (v3) I am far more interested to see the shift from Like/Loves (heart) to Applause (clapping).

From hearts to hands

More importantly, the supporting language is a much bigger shift.

We have gone from…

[name] likes [article title]

To the much more unusual…

[name] clapped for [article title]

Do I now say that “30 people clapped my article”? Or should that be “wow, today I got a big applause for my article”? Both feel, well… rather twee.

Likes

‘Likes’ has always been a challenging term that never quite fits across all contexts on social media. Users find themselves perplexed when wanting to acknowledge a post, especially when the post is negative or controversial. ‘Like’ never seems the appropriate response. Facebook clearly identified this by making a shift in 2015 towards Reactions, proving there is a legitimate need to express a wider range of emotions to the complexities of everyday content.

The mental model here for Medium feels slightly out of context too. The redesign of the new Medium logo has been discussed as a shift from the world of social media into a more serious grown up context of “we want to be premium content” (as nicely discussed by Fran Rosa on Brand News recent article about the Medium redesign. Is ‘applause’ the new grown up response?

Applause

Making the change to ‘applause’ feels somewhat gimmicky and out of place. Surely ‘applause’ would be a more appropriate response in the context of theatre, comedy or music - generally towards the world of entertainment and physical experiences.

In the physical world the written word rarely would be given an applause reaction.

A ‘recommendation’ — yes.

A ‘seal of approval’ — maybe.

A ‘share’, ‘bookmark’, ‘prize’ or a ‘front page’ — most likely.

But then again — what icons would best represent those? And would these be any clearer?

Capping the Clapping

Medium have decided to ‘cap the clap’ at an arbitrary 50 (why this number we are intrigued to know?). This therefore renders the new applause feature as a form of star rating — the more claps given being equal to the higher the recommendation. Guaranteed this does allow some freedom to the user and can indicate a more flexible way of showcasing levels of approval. However as this is a new mental model for users, I wonder if they will revert back to older behaviours and comfort zones by applying the exact same principles as the star rating model — equating a similar logic:

10 claps = 1 star = poor

50 claps =5 stars=excellent

Will we see anyone taking the time to click/tap 50 times! — I suspect “aint nobody got time for dat”. These behaviours will be interesting to track in the coming months.

Alternatives

Buzzfeed use an interesting word based model for their reactions.

This offers far more flexibility. My recommendation is to allow users to add their own tags, whilst offering others the ability to rate them. Offering the functionality to add tag words such as ‘educational’, ‘controversial’, ‘inspirational’ solves the context problems limited by ‘applause’. This also could override the authors tags, often allocated in a way to generate traffic or increase SEO and may not be helpful for users when seeking related content.


By no means is this trying to criticise the decision. I believe there to be no right or wrong solution to this problem. What I do want to do is encourage discussion about this. Get feedback from others who have conducted research on encouraging reactions and participation to content over and above the ‘star rating’ and the good ol’ ‘thumbs up’.

Medium, if you are listening — please, we welcome and encourage you to share your research about this design decision so that we can all gain learnings from it.


//Edit

Medium have posted an interesting article regarding this design change. Would still be good to know more detail and insights.

https://blog.medium.com/show-authors-more-%EF%B8%8F-with-s-c1652279ba01


Thanks to…
Evan-Amos for article image
Stuart Jones @gingerbbm for providing Facebook context

)

Plexus Design

Written by

Jenna Law is a UX, Product + Service Design Director in NYC. User Focused. Experience Driven. Design Led. www.plexusdesign.us

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