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Skype: Too Many Smiley Faces

April 19, 2018 mgroves 0 Comments
Tags: usability

I noticed a recent change to Skype, specifically in the chat client.

3 lines of Skype text chat, each with a smiley face icon at the end

Look at all those smiley faces!

At first, I thought, the person that I'm chatting with is really overdoing it on the smileys. I get it, you're being friendly!

But it turns out: if you hover over the smiley face, it's a "react to this message" button.

Hover over tooltip saying "React to this" with a menu of emojis floating over that.

Do the Skype product managers really think that "reacting" to a chat message is so common that it needs to have its own icon and menu for every single message?

Or maybe this is more useful in a group chat setting? Is Skype trying to compete with Slack and IRC?

Either way, I found it very distracting, confusing, and unnecessary. Most of my Skype chat is 1-on-1, and this icon is completely superfluous for that. It is only marginally useful for group chat.

I would suggest a single smiley face icon in the "Type a message here" area instead. Skype already has that, but it brings up a completely different menu. Which is also confusing.

If there was a way to turn this off, I would use it.

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Matthew D. Groves

About the Author

Matthew D. Groves lives in Central Ohio. He works remotely, loves to code, and is a Microsoft MVP.

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