UI cheat sheet: The 5 love languages of the web

As a pattern, liking is just an action a user takes on someone else’s content that doesn’t do anything apart from increase a tally. This means, there is also no way to reference the things you have liked. For example, you can’t go onto Instagram and easily see a list of all the content you have ever liked.

The word ‘ like’is also a good example of ‘ real world’language being turned into a Ui. You wouldn’t say you ‘ heart’or ‘ Star’an Ice-Cream shop, you would say that you ‘ like’it. There has also been a shift away from the thumbs up icon and towards the heart icon. According to Wikipeida — it wasn’t Facebook who invented the like button (gasp!)

In the olden days, Facebook used to have the old school like button with the thumbs up. The idea that you could just ‘ like’something without any effort took off, and then came in the awkward social interactions. This is where ‘ reactions’come in. They provide the user with options other than ‘ like’to better express their emotions towards a subject. Reactions are ‘ like ’, ‘ love ’, ‘ Haha ’, ‘ Wow ’, ‘ sad ’,

Clapping hands is a way to show that you really like something. If you see something with 100 claps, it could have come from just 100 people or two people. If you have a crush on medium, go give their stories 50 claps. They will think you are weird, but at least they will appreciate the effort.

Saving is generally understood as a way to avoid losing something. While it was traditionally thought of as a method to protect your work, the meaning has broadened to include saving something you have seen online. For the sake of this section, we will be ignoring ‘saving work,’ and ‘saving your place in a game’ and just focus on saving content online.

Icon: Bookmark icon or the word ‘ save’. Some sites allow you to save content to a collection or a group. This makes Referencing a lot easier. Y'all, I remember when the Pinterest button used to say ‘ pin it’. But then (Cue dramatic thundercloud sounds) they changed it to just say ‘ save ’.

Adding to a Wishlist or a Registry is used almost exclusively in Ecommerce. If something is added to a Wishlist, it gives you an opportunity to continue interactions with your users about the product that they have their eye on, until you push them over the edge. If you are a fan of ye old dark patterns, you can even tell the users when you are about to run out of that product. The heart icon is more Emotive and less ‘ committal’than the save icon ..

You probably first became acquainted with Bookmarking in your Browser’s Bookmark bar. While it doesn’t work differently to saving, Bookmarking is usually used for something you have to complete like a movie or an article. Youtube also lets you add a Video to a ‘ watch later’list, but it is more like the ‘ save to collection’pattern.

On Spotify you ‘like’ a song. You then go navigate to ‘Liked Songs’ and replay it 23 times.

Facebook used to use the classic like button and are fairly synonymous with it, although now they use reactions. However, you can still just hit the ‘like’ button as opposed to choosing a reaction.
Instagram uses a heart-shaped icon.
Twitter used to have a favourite (star) icon but moved over to using a heart button to align with everyone else. (source)
Vimeo are the original like button creators.
TikTok apparently also uses the like button. But being on the wrong side of 25 I can’t confirm this.
Dribbble also uses a like button.

Like ‘saving’, ‘favoriting’ is referenceable. But unlike saving, it is usually used on your own content. Favoriting is usually used to help the user organize their own ‘things’ like emails and files.

The Star icon is usually used to indicate importance in your own content, as opposed to content owned by others. Email services like Gmail use the Star icon to group important Emails.Google photos uses the Star icon to group your favorites.

The product I work on is a) science-based and, b) collaborator sourced. So while we initially wanted to put star ‘ratings’ on our content, it wasn’t a good move for our collaborators. We didn’t want their content getting ⅕ starts (even if it deserved it). So, the next option was ‘liking’ which felt a bit too unprofessional for the brand. Leaving our last option which was favoriting. It works for the product, even though users were favoriting content that wasn’t their own.

Ratings are kinda like the people of the world trying to help other people of the world out. Movie is 3 stars? Wait till it comes out on Netflix. Restaurant is 4.5 stars and only has one $? Count me in. Not sure what to read on your holiday with your in-laws to make yourself seem clever? Rank those business books according to popularity. 

Generally speaking, when you rate something it will usually be out of 5. Why 5? I’m not sure, but here are a few of my best guesses:

• It is easier to Substatize 5 stars than it is to count to 10.
• 5 stars are easier to work with than 10.
• 5 is an odd number, which means that a neutral score is possible. E.g. If you say something is 3 stars, you neither love it nor hate it.

When rating something, it is seldom that you will do it without attaching a written review alongside it. More and more sites are also using multiple ratings to get an overall score. A rental property could be perfect except the host wasn’t very good at replying to messages, which should affect the whole score. As a general rule, the less specific the products are (for example on Amazon) the less detailed you can be with your rating and review form. Sometimes, you see Brand-Specific ratings,

Youtube in 2010 moved away from a Star rating system to a ‘ Like/Dislike’one. The staff said the change was because users seldom used the numbers 2,3,4 and preferred the 1 and 5 stars. This style creates quite Polarising opinions of a piece of content.

Up/down voting is a really interesting method of surfacing content that other users would find interesting. Like the ‘ Like/Dislike’pattern it can be fairly polarizing. One of the big disadvantages of this is quickly burning through interesting or controversial content due to early down voting.

Images and short text posts don't usually get view counts that are publicly visible. Instagram counts something as a view after 3 seconds according to Matthias Funk for Tubics. Music apple music and Spotify both don’t show the amount of views, while Soundcloud does. If you are on one of the first two, you are already ‘ famous’and if you are on Soundcloud you are more ‘ Garage-Bandy’in which case, Listens/Views count.

Encourage users to sign up for pro accounts, and then distribute the fee across the artists that they spend the most time interacting with. Back 2017, the service paid $0.0064 per stream. By last year, that number had risen to $0.00783. Today, that number has settled at $0.00735. Spotify’s Per-Stream rate ranks as one of the worst, and it appears to be falling.