It's a long article, but here seem to be the relevant parts:
Facebook researchers started the project by compiling the most frequent responses people had to posts: “haha,” “LOL,” and “omg so funny” all went in the laughter category, for instance. Emojis with eyes that transformed into hearts, GIF animations with hearts beating out of chests, and “luv u” went in the love category. Then they boiled those categories into six common responses, which Facebook calls Reactions: angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love.
Facebook Reactions won’t get rid of like—it will be an extension. Within the company, there was some debate on how to add the options without making every post look crowded with things to click. The simpler Facebook is to use, the more people will use it. Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses down on it a little longer, the other options will reveal themselves. Cox’s team went with that and added animation to clarify their meaning, making the yellow emojis bounce and change expression. The angry one turns red, looking downward in rage, for example. Once people click their responses, the posts in News Feed show a tally of how many wows, hahas, and loves each generated.
Thank you for the great summary. The article was definitely too long with too much filler, and with distracting animations that made me just give up on it.
I thought the same thing, and left the article to come to HN hoping for a summary (and got it!), BUT.. to be fair, the title "Inside Facebook's decision.." hints at being an exposé rather than a quick factoid.
Sounds a bit like it's going in the Slashdot direction. I once had a very similar idea when I used to have a website with a custom forum and wanted a way to describe certain posts with a handful of simple tags.
Personally I think a 'helpful' or 'useful' reaction is badly needed also, but apparently it's not a common enough reaction to show up on Facebook's radar.
Obviously, given the near six billion dollars they made, they know what they're doing. But....
This doesn't fix anything currently making Facebook suck. It makes it noisier.
My solution would be a tagging system. People can add tags (that don't even need to be shown by default), and other friends' feeds can be filtered by the tags.
For instance: This is a baby pic? Tag it as baby. In my feed, I will never need to see another baby again.
Other people don't like politics or football. They can get tagged as such, and ignored by those who don't like those topics.
This would absolutely positively fix Facebook for me. They are smart enough to make it work. No more babies PLEASE!!!
Given how YouTube's tagging system eventually ended up working , and twitters current one I suspect tags won't function like you envision #reply #hn #hackers #yc #apple #eatingdinner
The key words in my post were that the friends tag them, and the tags are not seen by default. After a certain number of "categories" are added, they wouldn't need any more.
It'd be a messy solution for Facebook but an awesome and nonintrusive solution for annoyed users once it's working.
Looking at it I was wondering what are the chances that it would lead to posting of an unintended reaction ("Haha" instead of "Love"). Once a reaction is tapped on, it is gone to the wild forever. There won't be any undo.
With 'Like' button there is no chance of accident as there is nothing else. And considering the reaction feature is being built for mobile - small screen, distracted attention, unsteady hands, the chances of 'oops' scenario are quite high.
I've accidentally liked things before, and there is still an undo.. you just tap it again or change your reaction. Do it fast enough and you'll avoid any embarrassing broadcasts.
>Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses down on it a little longer, the other options will reveal themselves.
Talk about unintuitive UI. I don't understand this recent fad of pressing harder/longer on a button to discover a secret hidden feature that's unavailable otherwise.
I read an interesting piece that argues that the confusing interface is actually a feature. Can't find it at the moment, but it went something like:
Snapchat's confusing interface complements the way their users interact. Users tend to learn about features from social interactions with their friends (face to face, or digital), which builds a sense of ingroup. Additionally, the confusing interface tends to filter out older users, who lack the social guidance of the younger users. This keeps the userbase heavily skewed young, which further reinforces its branding as a fun app for the cool kids. After all, nothing is less cool than your mom doing the things you like.
I'm not sure that this is what the company wants (they've had screenshots of a redesigned UI leak this week), but it makes logical sense to me.
Snapchat is unusable if you don't learn this hidden "long press" action. Facebook will still be Facebook for you with all its cat photos, link-sharing, memes, blog posts and likes even if you don't figure out how to say "angry".
You are not the only one, I'm building mobile chat applications for a living (6 years now) and to this day I don't "get" the Snapchat UI.
I believe the UI has been tweaked for users that are more impulsive. I know it sounds strange, but you open the app the first time and you are immediately asked to make a picture of something and then send it to someone. (even though you haven't seen your available contacts yet)
Yes I agree, but it is an interesting choice to ask the user to send a picture even though he didn't yet have the chance to see who else from his contacts is using Snapchat.
I think it's smart. You can break down this feature into two types of users:
- A user that has friends on snapchat. For them, just sign up and snap a picture. You're off to the races. IMO, there's no reason to pick who I want to send it to until I take the picture.
- Another type of user would be someone who does not have any friends using SnapChat. For those people - you don't want to just say, "Sorry, you don't have any people to talk to - but feel free to play around with the camera." That probably won't encourage them to do much more with the app. Instead, you get them to create something first. When it's time to send their creation, they don't have anyone to send it to, but they are way more likely to say, "Hey <other person in the room>, download SnapChat so I can send you this hilarious thing I just made." Both of those people are way more likely to download and use the app - but the chance of them doing so goes way down if they never invest any time and creativity into the app.
Just my two cents, but I think it makes perfect sense.
It's a touch focused pattern. With a keyboard and mouse you had the ability to right-click or use a modifier key while clicking to bring up more options.
For more and more users touch is going to be their primary experience and eventually you are going to need some method to provide more options to the "power users". Longer-click seems the most obvious and common of the patterns.
Our web app uses right click in a few places mainly as a convenience to power users. The same functionality can be found by using visual indicators, but may take a couple more clicks.
Overall I agree with the parent comment. Right click and long-press are hard for non-power users to find/discover.
Yes. Desktop programs use it and I expect it there. On websites I generally expect my browsers normal right click menu and won't think to try right click on your web-app (especially if your web-app falls into the large number that should be simpler websites).
Most people won't even realise that a web-app can have a right click context menu (even those that use right click in their desktop programs all the time).
However, Facebook's long-press function makes sense inside an app. It's less a webapp there, and more a desktop app--even though it's interfacing with the Internet, it's presented standalone, not as a place to go within another program. You don't expect to see the browser's long-press menu in the Facebook app, because there is no browser.
As for desktop, if they're intelligent at all, they'll use a different method there. Perhaps all the new variations will be displayed side by side. Perhaps instead of only trigfering on a "long-click", it'll expand on a normal click.
Really though? What do you do in the context menu within a browser (assuming you are not a developer looking for view source/inspect element type things?) If that was not my day job I would have absolutely no use for the browser's context menu.
Correct. I do virtually nothing with it within the browser. But I don't even think about it as a possibility - so if you put functionality in the right click menu on a website/webapp I would have basically zero chance of finding it. I don't think I'm alone.
Right click on the desktop is no more discoverable, yet it's use is pervasive and it's universally understood. Discoverability isn't the only criterion for a "good UI". Frankly for something like Facebook (on which the median user spends hours a day) it's probably not even the most important one.
Well, this design motif has been around long enough that I wouldn't necessarily call it a "recent fad". One obvious example that springs to mind is holding icons on the iOS home screen to move or delete them.
At least that movement is natural. If your objective is to move an icon from A to B you will probably end up holding it for a second without anyone telling you about the secret icon moving feature.
It's smart imho, as it leads people to what the default choice should be by artificially making the other choices harder. And you might disagree but studies have shown that choices make people unhappy.
On the other hand these were needed let's say because some items are not appropriate to Like. Like say a piece of news for some tragedy.
But I do think this will backfire as I think it will lower engagement. Right now when people cannot Like, they Share. And for other reactions they place comments. Many in the form of emoticons but still.
It's because touchscreens can't right-click or middle-click.
I'd prefer a halo ring around the button that appears when you touch or mousedown that presents additional options related to the button. If you touch, move your pointer, then release over a secondary function, it activates, otherwise a simple touch and release activates the main function.
Similar functionality is available for gamepad devices, where a choice wheel appears, and a directional input can select any of the 1 to 8 available options.
It's because they don't want to add buttons, because buttons are "ugly", and usability takes a backseat to looking pretty in screenshots.
My estimate is that the average person knows about maybe a third or a half of the features on their smartphone, because the rest are hidden away behind never-explained gestures or long presses on things that don't look like buttons.
In terms of conveying functionality the popular smartphone and webpage UIs today are atrocious. Just today I was talking with someone who was really frustrated that they can't see webpages anymore because web browsers all got rid of the magnification feature. He was amazed to discover that it has been there all along but hidden away in a menu that doesn't even appear unless you hit alt. He thought all of that was moved over to the "hamburger" menu, and they just dropped it. He's been squinting for months (years?) because someone doesn't like the look of dropdown menus.
To risk getting sidetracked, what browser doesn't have zoom controls in the main menu? I just checked the default layouts of all of them and other than IE's cryptic "Tools" menu shaped as a gear, I wouldn't call the zoom feature hidden. Perhaps the problem was he was looking for the icon of a magnifying glass. That had to be abandoned because it conflicted with the standardish icon for "Find".
But I generally agree with your sentiment. You can't rely on users to poke around and find features on their own. I recently talked to a teenager who despite having used Windows all his life said he only "just" learned about Alt-Tab.
Yesyesyes. This as well as "everything needs to be done in JS", even static pages.
Gnome (ongoing dumbification since gnome), Canonical (Unity, although HUD was a nice idea), Microsoft (ribbon, although it has some decent ideas) etc etc.
There is room for huge improvements in UI: more search-friendlyness, a way to explain scary buttons in mobile UIs since they don't naturally seem to support hover etc etc
Dumbifying things, both by assuming your users are useless and cannot learn new features, as well as just plain weird ideas like breaking alt-tab without checking (Unity) or hiding save button in Office behind what looks like a logo (MS ribbon early edition) should hopefully be less important.
Yep, and totally obvious. Most people only discover that feature by accident, and then they're asking me how to fix it because they don't know what they did. Especially on laptops where the "scroll wheel" is just part of the touchpad.
On the contrary, this is non-intrusive and discoverable. The user isn't presented with a dense interface and too many choices, but if he does want to do more advanced interactions he will find a way to learn about it.
It's discoverable in the sense that if you do the right thing, you discover it. It's undiscoverable in the sense that, even now with long-tap being a fairly common "right click" on touch devices, there's no indication (unless I've missed one) that a long tap does anything here until you try it by accident. It's not a question of "that's hard to do", but of "why would you even do that?" A horizontal pinch-zoom or horizontal drag would be arguably more intuitive as a way to expand the like button.
I also think that perhaps there needs to be someone willing to take a few arrows in the chest before new UI concepts become so common as to be generally accepted as 'intuitive'.
Feels a little forced that Zuckerberg had a solution to this himself. This has been a feature on most keyboards for a while for fitting in more characters.
In Google Inbox I was looking for "mute" the other day in the mobile app. Couldn't find it anywhere. Turns out it's a long-press on the normal "done" button (the checkmark), which I found by Googling. I never would have found it on my own, but now that I know about it it seems convenient and intuitive.
I think this style of interaction is fine if it's a nonessential bonus feature. For those who never discover the added options, they can still like something as they always have.
This kind of unintuitive UI was once also frequently used in Android apps. The long press.
But over the time more and more high profile apps removed these features simply because so many users never knew that they could long press on something to reveal additional functionality.
Also the Android old menu button was removed for the same reasons. It was a hidden menu that could show different options depending on which screen within the app you were.
I could imagine that it could be different for users with Apples force touch or 3D touch, but we'll have to wait and see.
The really interesting takeaway from this article for me was that product executives make many decisions based on simple intuition, industry experience, and "I've heard it worked over there."
There are numerous mentions of failed product roll-outs(News Feed as a failure at first, Paper, etc.) But the key quote is here, when they talk about the meeting: "Cox agrees. 'My intuition, which we could prove wrong, is people just want more stuff.'
I'm sure that Facebook uses data to back up some of its assertions; after all, they did mine comments to come up with the most common reactions. But how many people's entire internet experience (i.e. consumption of news through the News Feed) is impacted just by some senior guy in a room going, "This sounds right to me," and everyone scrambling to work on what he proposes?
Facebook trialled this feature on smaller markets before the large rollout it's getting now.
Data has its place, but you can only user-test things after they're already built, and you can't build everything. At some point, somebody has to make a gut decision on what's worth sending to user testing.
"But how many people's entire internet experience (i.e. consumption of news through the News Feed) is impacted just by some senior guy in a room going, "This sounds right to me,"
Like senior exec of IT buying into enterprise solutions that sound good on paper and make everyone's life living hell. "Business people will be able to make programming changes without developers using visio diagram!"
I imagine this will make their sentiment analysis better. Hopefully, it will be weighted sufficiently highly in the newsfeed algorithm that I can start to exert some control on the newsfeed again. I can mostly keep my feed relevant by blocking whole sites (huffpo, buzzfeed, etc), but it would be nice if Facebook knew when individual posts hit a "breakout" status and could appear in my feed again.
On the other hand, ion they use this too heavily, then the newsfeed becomes a serious echo chamber, where it is not only correlated to your friend group, but also to your "optimal" emotional reaction. Might be great for Facebook to sell more ads, but not necessarily great for the end user.
Slack's Reactji -- which lets you use any standard or custom emoji as a reaction -- is significantly more useful than Facebook's very limited set of options, and it came first.
You would think that after seeing how well received the Slack Reactji are, Facebook would have expanded its available options.
I can understand not venturing into custom emoji, but at least let there be a :pile-of-poo: reaction! After all, it's an election year!
I disagree: Slack tends to be used by work-related groups, where people are already semi-prepared for what any one of their co-workers might post in the company Slack channel(s).
Facebook is absolutely correct in keeping a very tight rein on this stuff, and in making the options uniformly "cute". If emotions start running too high, people will start abandoning the entire platform, I think.
You can put emoji in a comment for similar effect.
The facebook system allows a few critical things:
- a simple tally of reactions. With an open-ended set of emoji, it's a bit silly to tally emoji responses. With 6 options, the tallies are interesting.
- advertising. These six actions are a known quantity and can be baked into their advertising and display algorithms at every level. Using emoji, you'd have to build some kind of emoji-emotion-algorithm which classifies the use of all emoji in real time to a small set of factors for use in the algorithm
But yeah nothing is stopping you from filling up facebook messages and comments with :poo: emoji and stickers and gifs.
> - a simple tally of reactions. With an open-ended set of emoji, it's a bit silly to tally emoji responses. With 6 options, the tallies are interesting.
Slack's implementation is worth using to question whether of your speculated problems would actually be significant. It updates the tallies in real-time and requires only a single click to increment the count. Although people could use any emoji, in practice there are only a small percentage which are relevant and people tend to add to previous ones rather than add a random new one.
> - advertising. These six actions are a known quantity and can be baked into their advertising and display algorithms at every level. Using emoji, you'd have to build some kind of emoji-emotion-algorithm which classifies the use of all emoji in real time to a small set of factors for use in the algorithm
If an advertiser was trying to do this, they'd have to do all of that work either way – the only difference is the size of the lookup table. I think they'd be more worried about trying to gauge the target of the reaction – e.g. if I post something about politics and you use the angry reaction, it's much harder for a machine to tell whether you disagreed with me or were directing some righteous indignation at the subject of the story and that's the most valuable bit of info to know for deciding which candidate or party's ad to show.
I think it's far more than "the size of the lookup table" because that implies that each emoji has one purpose (like the Facebook 5 have one purpose).
Facebook's five choices are clear and universal human emotions that leave very little room for subjectivity.
Emoji, on the other hand, are used as a famously arcane new language where each symbol has many potential uses, as a pictogram in conjunction with others, or as multiple uses per emoji, as viral "inside" jokes meaning completely different things than depicted (tree, fire, or pineapple are often used to mean a drug, but how do you know when a tree symbol means a drug and when it means a pine tree?) "X_X face" is often used to mean sexytimes, but the X_X emoji is also used to mean exasperation.
Sad, happy, angry, these are simple to work with.
But how do you classify Back-Button? What does a user think of a post when they rate it "Alien-Face". When they use "Skull/Crossbone" are they saying danger/poison, or death, or Halloween, costumes, a movie?
I'm not sure you could ever get to an adequate level of programmatically understanding the intent behind emoji, but I think that it's not too difficult with 5 universal emotions.
I'm not disagreeing that it's more work but that even with only a few options, this problem is dwarfed by the question of intention, which is what advertisers really want to know. “angry face” might seem universal at first glance but it's not easy to tell who the anger is directed at, which is what advertisers would want. Even the binary Like has this problem where you don't know if someone liked a story, like the way a reporter smacked down the subject of the story, or the comment your friend made when they shared news about someone you dislike.
Besides, if Facebook only designed things for advertisers every post would have a mandatory form collecting demographic info. They know they have to make using the service enjoyable and this would be an easy way to boost interaction which doesn't make advertising fundamentally harder.
Slack's usage is tiny compared to Facebook's. Facebook has to account for a dozen things that Slack doesn't. The big one is all of the different cultures that use Facebook.
With a smaller set of emoji, you can analyze what text often is coupled with what emoji to help infer the meaning of text automatically. Great if you want to serve ads based on private messages, less of a concern if you just want to deliver a useful product.
The Coke recipe has changed significantly over time. It also varies by country (i.e. HFCS in the US, cane sugar in South America) and serving method (syrup etc).
The article sort of took a tangential direction from Reactions and went into Chris Cox's story. It was an interesting read, just that it would have been a better article had it been profiling him, instead of bundling it up here.
Good to have actual reactions anyways. "Someone announces her divorce on the site, and friends grit their teeth and 'like' it." Such cases are everybody's life events and there were no reactions to share unless you comment.
This feels like changing something just to change something, maybe because some executive wants to feel they're doing something important. Is there some unspoken rule in tech that you have to change things every so often, no matter what?
If my memory serves me, DeviantArt had something similar to this around a decade ago, and I thought it worked very well. It's an entirely different platform though. Also, I don't remember them having such annoying animations, nor omitting such basic emotions as "joy" because "people don't understand it".
D|A appears to have axed this system though, for whatever reason. I hope it works out better for Facebook.
Like button has nothing to do with people liking something.
It has everything to do with Facebook tracking users on 3rd party web pages. This way they know where you have been, for how long and how often. IMO this data is much more relevant to knowing users interests that enables FB to sell targeted ads.
Same goes for Google Analytics: that's the reason it is free - because you are the product.
"On a Wednesday in November, he enters a conference room for the second of five meetings and confesses that he’s breaking the rules: Executives are discouraged from scheduling meetings on Wednesdays, which is supposed to be a day engineers and designers can work without interruption."
Mind blown. What a great idea to ban meetings on Wednesdays!
Interesting to see Facebook make these types of decisions. They're in an interesting position because as much as they want to react to emerging behaviors to create for a great user experience, they're one of the few companies that has the ability to manufacture new behaviors on their platform.
Seems silly, since it's the most appropriate thing for lots of posts that don't fit into the other categories, like "Just got promoted", "I won $500 at the casino today", "My son just got first place at pinewood derby", "Just finished the last chapter for Winds of Winter it's going to the editors now", etc.
That stuck out to me, because those auto-video ads were one of the major reasons I uninstalled the facebook app entirely. Quickly checking some things on my phone while walking down the hall at work, or while some code runs I don't want to accidentally play some loud nonsense, and that happened often enough for me to downgrade my mobile facebook experience back to the browser. I still use facebook, but not the app.
That sort of jives with this anecdote as well:
"When the company redesigned the News Feed in 2013, it looked great on the iMacs in Facebook’s headquarters but made the product harder to use everywhere else."
Most computers aren't macs, let alone iMacs. How could you possibly miss out on testing for even one other thing? It's weirdly close-minded given what facebook is and how it presents itself.
I'm sure the iMac is just a stand-in for "high-end computer with a large display". That newsfeed was gorgeous and would have probably worked well on >90% of US PCs. The problems were with 10+ years old computers connected at modem speed in, let's say, eastern European government offices.
In my experience, facebook has settings reset bugs that can turn off previous settings, sometimes to your surprise. Like a friend group you choose to post to as a default gets reset to all friends without you noticing, or these kind of video autoplay settings.
"Cox says Reactions’ biggest test so far was during the November terrorist attacks in Paris. Users in the test countries had options other than like, and they used them. “It just felt different to use Facebook that day,” he says."
Facebook researchers started the project by compiling the most frequent responses people had to posts: “haha,” “LOL,” and “omg so funny” all went in the laughter category, for instance. Emojis with eyes that transformed into hearts, GIF animations with hearts beating out of chests, and “luv u” went in the love category. Then they boiled those categories into six common responses, which Facebook calls Reactions: angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love.
Facebook Reactions won’t get rid of like—it will be an extension. Within the company, there was some debate on how to add the options without making every post look crowded with things to click. The simpler Facebook is to use, the more people will use it. Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses down on it a little longer, the other options will reveal themselves. Cox’s team went with that and added animation to clarify their meaning, making the yellow emojis bounce and change expression. The angry one turns red, looking downward in rage, for example. Once people click their responses, the posts in News Feed show a tally of how many wows, hahas, and loves each generated.
edit: Yay was rejected as a choice.