To Emoji or Not To Emoji?

A bit of history…

Original feature request from the Engagement Team

We discussed emoji reactions back in 2014 when prioritising MVP specs for AJ+ in Q1–2014

Then Facebook rolled out emoji reactions globally yesterday and this happened…

Soud Hyder - Likes are so 2004! Its all about emoji... | Facebook

And the barrage….

Long story short, we deliberated on emoji reactions way back in 2014. Riyaad Minty one of the launch managers and pretty much the brains that catalysed AJ+ from an iterative set of 3+ years of project documents curated in a back office in Doha pushed really hard on emoji reactions.

The launch Product Manager; Dwayne Oxford (Malik) and myself pushed back quite a bit and downgraded this particular requirement to a P2. Citing the following concerns -:

1. We had more important issues to solve (mostly backend)and were focussing on the essential priorities and getting the bare media consumption experience up
2. There were design language and branding constraints. This was pre launch and we’d gone through several iterations of the branding before locking down on launch branding post the discovery phase

And in Q4–2015, while deliberating on our tvOS experience emoji reactions made a comeback.

Some of the questions posed to our focus group broadcast list

The main motivation at this time was to solve a couple of problems :-

1. The backend was stable enough and structured well enough to add new rating or reaction objects to any content type
2. Similar to Facebook, the one way like/favourite is not universal and proved contentious especially since most of our content tends to be news driven
3. The typical 5 star rating systems suck for video content on most video platforms suck. I mean whats the difference between a 3 and 5 star rated movie, its an apples and pears problem. Emoji reactions don’t solve everything but its a better solution
4. Emoji reactions are universal to all content types, ideally we wanted to evaluate a working model and expanding these to other platforms
5. AJ+ is driven by innovative storytelling, giving slightly more granular feedback to the production workflow provides greater insight
6. Emoji reactions have come of age

Emoji reactions on our tvOS (Apple TV) app

So we eventually activated emoji reactions on tvOS to see how well they would do. Rather than go an expanded emoji reactions (lots of choices could lead to complications), set we chose to limit them to 4 as can be seen above. We actually had a debate between 3 and 4, with limited data pointing slightly favouring 3, however our Head of UX; Hugh O’Connor insisted that 4 choices provided the minimum depth of emotions he’d like to see on AJ+ interfaces.

Sample of emoji reactions summary on a content piece in our backend

We’ve only activated this on tvOS and are seeing decent traction even with our rudimentary implementation. There’s only so much we can do with TVML and we had to get the MVP out of the door. Nonetheless it seems to be working.

Snapshot of total tvOS emoji ratings as of 24th Feb 2015

In a nutshell its still early days (including tvOS) but loads of interesting stuff happening not only at AJ+.

In hindsight, should we have approached it differently? More than likely not, perhaps we should have iterated faster. However going back to our decision to delay this until we cleaned up our backend will hopefully be critical to future iterations of this feature and our feedback loops especially when our data and analytics team plug into the emoji reactions data.

Design and front ends are the easy part, the UX bit and plugging it into the engine is the hard bit and I think we’ve built a solid foundation for this. So here you go Ned, you kind of have a point, we should have iterated faster 😬

→ Soud Hyder; Platforms Lead (glorified technical coordinator 🤐)at AJ+