A few thoughts on the introduction of Facebook Reactions
After a year in the making and months of testing in multiple regions around the world, Facebook finally announced the global rollout of Reactions, the emotional upgrade of the humble Like button. The update sees the addition of five additional reactions to keep the famous thumb company; Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry.
Reactions is an important update for many reasons, most notably because Facebook has historically faired pretty poorly when it comes to adapting to the emotive nature of people’s everyday lives. Just last year, this article by Eric Meyer — who has since gone on to do some amazing work around the concept of designing for crisis — went viral. Eric’s story underpinned Facebook’s inability to distinguish between the positive and negative aspects of life and it certainly caused Mark Zuckerberg and co. to sit up and take notice. In an article written to mark the year since, Eric has revealed just how seriously Facebook took his feedback, and it wasn’t long before we saw meaningful changes to the likes of Memories and the Year in Review, which originally highlighted Facebook’s emotional deficiencies to Eric and so many others.
Around the world, people have come to use Facebook as something of a diary for chronicling key events in a person’s life, be they good, bad or ugly. When someone reveals a piece of bad news to their friends a Like just feels too emotionless; it doesn’t convey the correct meaning well enough, while sometimes a comment can be just too difficult to write. The addition of reactions such as anger and sadness will allow people to send something more than just a nod of recognition; it allows them to send something akin to empathy.
Many people may wonder why Facebook have once again ignored the calls for a simple dislike button, but this could potentially lead down a much more negative path; one which Mark Zuckerberg has expressed concerns about on numerous occasions. Given the trolling and general negativity that is costing Twitter quite dearly these days, it seems a wise decision to stay clear of something which carries as much potential for ambiguity as it does pure negativity. Maintaining Facebook’s status (no pun intended) as the social media platform of choice in the face of competition from Instagram, which has a strong and friendly community vibe of around 400million users, will no doubt be a key factor in keeping things as clean and friendly as possible.
The decision to disregard a dislike button and move forward with an emoji-based interface also seems to mirror the more widespread adoption of visual language across the globe. Emojis, gifs and memes are all part of the trend and Reactions play into that space nicely. The need to cater to multiple countries, languages and cultures is something they’ve addressed publicly; the five additional Reactions are based upon the most universally used phrases in the Comments across all cultures and displayed in a fun and visually appealing way which avoids the confusion and misinterpretation of written language. The lengthy testing process which this feature has undergone is testament to the fact that this has been a considered and well thought through update. They will no doubt continue to test and iterate as time goes by but they certainly seem to have done a lot of leg work upfront on this one.
In this respect, and as a final thought, it’s nice to see companies like Google and Facebook sharing insights into their design thinking, following Google’s discussion about their rebranding back in 2015. It lends a welcome weight of importance to the design industry and, given their global standing and credibility in such things, encourages other companies to likewise and invest in user experience design and design thinking. Going forward, this can only be a good thing as products and services become easier and more functional for the average user to interact with and use on a daily basis. At this stage, the introduction of Facebook Reactions seems like a healthy step in the right direction.
This article was first published on uxandthat.com.
Additional Resources
Wired.com: Facebook Reactions, the Totally Redesigned Like Button, Is Here
