Meta, 2024
Quick-react to a message
[Reaction suggestions on most recent message]
TL;DR
​Impact​​
-
Directly collaborated with the Messenger Leadership team to accelerate approval processes.
-
Thoughtful collaboration with engineers to drive dogfooding sessions with the design team to ensure designs are true to spec.
-
​Led brainstorming session to collaborate with other cross-functional partners
Learning highlights​​
-
This project taught me how to be a more efficient and reliable collaborator. This project needed a very quick turnaround, and ultimately helped to move the team forward was organization and transparent communication, rather than rushing the actual design process.​​​
Problem Statement
People need a lightweight and quick way to reply to their friends and family.
​
People sometimes forget to reply, creating gaps in communication. Reactions offer a quick, lightweight way to respond—but even these can be overlooked.
On Messenger, reactions are accessed by long-pressing a message, following the industry standard. However, this method can feel hidden to some users.
Hypothesis: Increasing awareness of reactions will lead to more frequent use.
The Solution
We found emojis are a quick, low-effort way to express feelings, making them ideal for reactions. Yet, usage was low—mainly due to poor discoverability.
To fix this, we considered a persistent, contextual entry point near the latest message. This raised key questions:
-
Should we suggest specific emojis?
-
Or just make the reaction option more visible?
Each approach had trade-offs:
-
A new entry point risks visual clutter.
-
Emoji suggestions might be contextually off or inappropriate.
The Creation
I took this problem to various iteration rounds and discussed with the team during our feedback sessions what the best solution would be to add a new entry-point without suggesting any emojis.
Ultimately, I decided that the entry-point brought enough awareness, and allowing users to pick their own reaction was still a lightweight experience. The trade-off of having an inaccurate reaction or potentially offensive was ultimately too high, which is why I stayed away from specific-emoji options.
Text entry-point
Image entry-point
Reel entry-point
The Final Product
*During my 3 years at Meta, including my 2 internships, I've worked on numerous projects regarding GenAI, chat expressions, utility, group-chat-based features, and more. Please reach out directly if you want to learn more.
