Meta, 2024
Quick-react to a message
Edit already-sent messages
Project Overview
"Quick reactions" is a project launched in 2024 that facilitates replies by adding an entry-point contextual in the chat attached to the most recent message.
💭 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.
My role
👩💻Product designer 📼 Prototyper
📝 Research partner ✉️ Content designer
My impact
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Worked closely with Messenger Leadership team to accelerate approval processes.
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Thoughtful collaboration with engineers to drive dogfooding sessions with the design team to ensure designs are true to spec.
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Led brainstorming session to collaborate with other cross-functional partners
Problem Statement
People need a lightweight and quick way to reply to their friends and family.
sometimes forget to reply to messages. This creates a gap in communication between the sender and receiver. Reactions are a great way to offer a lightweight reply. However, even then, this can take some time.
Currently, people can react on messager by long pressing the message and opening the reactions tray. Even though this is the default industry standard for reactions, it's still somewhat hidden.
Hypothesis: People will react more if we raise awareness of reactions.
The Solution
We realized that emojis are a good way to capture a feeling, and reaction quick and stress-free. Combining these two, it makes for the perfect starting point; however, reactions are already available. Why are people not using it?
The biggest problem we saw through research was discoverability. We could fix this problem by creating a more persistent entry-point that's also contextual to the latest message. The question now is how this would look like. Should we suggest specific emojis? Should we just surface the entry-point to the chat conversation? Both options came with trade-offs:
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Adding a new entry-point to every chat can create clutter.
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If we suggest specific emojis, we might suggest inaccurate emojis for the situation.
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.
