A Compass for Building User Reactions into any new app
User Reactions
Reactions delight users and enrich the underlying content, driving engagement. They can be great for providers to build and showcase a brand image of mass popularity also.
Makers of enterprise and end-user communication and productivity products increasingly build-in user reactions that have blended seamlessly into product and content development. Reaction features aim to provide user delight and companies use the reactions to gather user level and mass market insight. Here is a compass I drew in table format, to serve as a guide for choosing among the main reaction features for your product:
Reviews and comments
Reviews and comments provide great user insight however they require more time commitment by the user. Users who paid a larger amount for a product or were truly delighted by it would be more willing to put in the time and effort required for these reactions. These reactions can be a bit complex and time consuming to analyze as well. Reviews in particular can be analyzed using AI based sentiment analysis.
Emojis
Emojis have become ubiquitous in end-user text products and text content including chat, slack, teams, and gmail. They provide a growing variety of choices of expression and clearly provide both user experience and user delight. Their growing variety means that all the users may not be familiar with all the available emojis and therefore analysis to gauge user sentiment may not be meaningful. However users continue to grow more familiar everyday and the emoji set keeps growing further at the same time.
Ratings
Ratings are widely used as a quality estimate. They are as easy for the user as Likes, claps, and follows, while providing the ability to express positive-neutral-negative sentiment. Most users are willing to provide their rating vs the no-reaction mode several users assume when presented with the option of a Like, Follow, or Clap alone. Ratings are convenient for companies also — they can be used to get insights both at the user and mass level easily. Companies can dig deeper by starting conversations with corresponding users as needed.
Likes, claps and follows
Likes, claps and follows are easy for users to do with almost no time commitment. They can be cited in the media and used as an aggregate indicator of buzz in the product or content. However they are one-dimensional, and, focus on positive sentiment. This can make them vulnerable to manipulation, and the ease of use increases the issue. Because of this reason these reactions might not provide a useful indicator of the utility provided to any particular user. However the utility at a brand scale is very high.
Choosing a reaction format
Users feel delighted when their goal is achieved and work gets automated so that they have more time for things they aspire to do and love to do. Users also feel delighted when overcome by emotion and they easily use emojis, likes, and similar reactions in these moments. Additionally as more of everything has moved online users simply want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and having that feeling brings them delight — having a way to create reviews and likes / similar feedback about popular topics or following celebreties serves this purpose.
Ratings serve a slightly different and dual purpose, enabling users to provide feedback about goal achievement and for providers to iterate on products by analyzing reactions both at the user level and the mass level. Ratings can be segmented into subcategories and coupled with reviews. However to truly understand what about a product helps users reach their goal, what inhibits users from usage, and to iterate on a product or service, rating categories have to be designed thoughtfully. Ratings are currently used mainly for products and services not content. Currently content hubs like Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, limit reactions to simple positive reactions. Users cannot rate content from one to five. However this might be changing soon. Now linkedin has switched from a positive-only one-dimensional-like mode to a positive-only five-dimensional like-celebrate-love-curious-insightful mode. So a new reaction in-between emojis and ratings that enables users to give both positive and negative feedback, might well be created any day.
You can find this article on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/choosing-reaction-format-your-products-content-ritu-malhotra
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