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Julie Zhuo: Expanding Reactions on Facebook

Name: Julie Zhuo: Expanding Reactions on Facebook
Uploaded: 2016-11-30T17:49:40+00:00
Duration: 2 min 27 s
Channel: GHION.AI
Description: In this talk, Julie Zhuo explains how Facebook identified the need for richer emotional responses beyond the simple "Like" button and how the team…

30 Nov 2016 · 2 min

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2:27

In this talk, Julie Zhuo explains how Facebook identified the need for richer emotional responses beyond the simple "Like" button and how the team designed the Reactions feature. The process began with extensive user research, where participants described their feelings while scrolling through their newsfeeds, revealing a desire for more expressive, lightweight options. The team also analyzed existing user behavior—stickers, emojis, and very short comments—to understand how people currently conveyed disapproval or nuanced feelings. By aggregating this data, they pinpointed the most common emotions users wanted to express and set design goals: the new reactions had to be usable with a single hand and a single gesture, avoiding multiple taps. The result was a set of universal, lightweight reaction icons presented in a tray that users can swipe through, fulfilling the identified need while preserving the simplicity of the original Like interaction.

Chapters

For the people problem of not everything that I see in newsfeed is likable and I want to be able to express other emotions. We wanted to make sure that this was actually a problem that many people faced and that the solution that we had would actually directly address it. So we talked to a lot of users. We had them go through their feeds and describe to us for each story, what was their reaction, what were they feeling, sort of like free flow. Tell us what's going through their minds as they're going through their feeds. And a lot of times people will say, well, there should be more ways for me to just say something. Because what I like about the like button is that it's so simple. I don't have to go and comment and the keyboard comes up and I have to two handedly type something. I like the fact that I can just in one gesture kind of scroll through things and then say that I like it. But the only thing that I can do is like, and there's got to be other ways for me to express other emotions. We also looked at how are people using, how are people expressing that they don't like something today? And we looked at the stickers that people were using and leaving us comments as well as the emoji and what were kind of the most popular ones. How frequently were people just leaving a simple sticker or a simple emoji? And finally we looked at also short comments. So we looked at how many comments were just one or two words and all they expressed was like awesome or that sucks or a very, very short phrase that we felt we could encapsulate. So with all of that, we decided we looked at all that data, we looked at what were the most common emotions that people wanted to express. And we designed something that we felt was sort of fulfilled that criteria of being really, really lightweight. So you can still do it with one hand and one gesture. It's not like multiple taps. And we also taking all of the data that we had gotten from what were the most common things that people, the common reactions that they had, we built the reactions product. And so you just scrub through and we took the top most, what we wanted to be universal reactions and that's the options that you see in that tray.