It's Here! Presenting Facebook’s Extended ‘Emotions Palette’

Facebook has finally allowed us to express in more ways, much beyond the ‘thumbs up’ like button. In September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg had the tech world buzzing after he hinted at working towards a possible expansion of the like button. After months of user testing in some countries, Facebook has finally released it to the rest of the world. Just by long-pressing—or, on a computer, hovering—over the “like” button, users can now access five additional animated emoji to express themselves. Each emotive icon is named for the reaction it’s meant to convey. 'Like' we already know too well — now say hello to 'love', 'haha', 'wow', 'sad' and 'angry.'

Facebook had received a lot of feedback regarding the need for the platform to offer broader ways for users to express themselves. The fact that every post is not likeable was an obvious element to consider. The first step was to analyze the most common reactions of people to posts and then translating it to something more universal. In December 2015, 1.44 billion people accessed Facebook on mobile. Of people who access it on both a monthly and daily basis, 90 percent of them did so via a mobile device.  Commenting may offer detailed responses, but composing those responses on a smartphone keypad takes too much time. “People needed a way to leave feedback that was quick, easy, and gesture-based, says Julie Zhuo, Product Design director at Facebook. Thus,Emojis, it seemed, were the best option.

This feature was first tested in Ireland and Spain, as Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s director of product, says it’s because both have largely national user bases without extensive international friend networks, so they work better as closed test groups. Ireland is English speaking, while Spain lets Facebook test out how well the wordless emoji play with non-English users. The team took a subset of reactions that cut across the emotional spectrum and removed redundancies like sympathy and sadness, and joy and love. When a user thumbs over each of the emoji, they animate like tiny GIFs. For “Wow,” the yellow face tilts upwards, its mouth agape. For “Haha,” a squinty-eyed emoji tilts its head back in a fit of laughter. Other visual details like eyebrows make the faces more expressive, especially at smaller sizes. 

This change is certainly a big move for the company as these new interactions make way onto people’s newsfeed. As a new emotional palette arrives for people to express themselves, it certainly will make the news feed more personalised. It seems these reactions will seamlessly become second nature to users as if it was always there. But the question is “What took you so long FB?”

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