Last Thursday,
Let’s first examine the reactions themselves. The “Like” icon is a recognizable thumb. The rest, from left to right, have been dubbed “Love,” “Haha,” “Yay,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Anger,” and they probably look familiar, too. That’s because Facebook Reactions aren’t actually new at all. Rather, they are Facebook’s animated take on a handful of long-established Unicode emoji characters: “Haha” mimics “smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes” (😆) while the color and countenance of “Anger” is clearly designed to resemble the so-called “pouting face” (😡); “Yay” and “Sad” are modeled after “smiling face with smiling eyes”(😊) and “crying face” (😢), respectively; while “Wow” appears to be based on some combination of“hushed face” (😯) and “astonished face” (😲). In fact, the only original icon looks to be that designated as the “Love” reaction; while there’s currently no shortage of heart emojis to choose from, none of the existing options resembles the flat, white-on-red design that Facebook features here.
“The play here is pretty clear,” says Nate Clinton, director of product strategy at Cooper, an NYC-based design firm. “Facebook doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel,” or in this case its own, wholly original icon. Its users are already accustomed to interacting with emoji in plenty of other mediums. Facebook probably wants to play nice with this existing paradigm, says Clinton, so users can adjust to the new feature more seamlessly. more…