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People come to Yammer to have meaningful conversations, to share knowledge, and to build communities. Conversations on Yammer can inform you about a colleague’s personal milestone, help you seek information from a colleague who is more than one degree away in your organization and help you recognize the amazing accomplishments of your team. You may need more than a ‘like’ to express yourself on these conversations. That is why we are rolling out reactions for every conversation or reply in the new Yammer. You can now express yourself through gratitude and celebration, laughter, and sadness-just like in real life. This gives you more ways to respond or express your feelings in the conversations you care most about, while gaining insight about how others feel about your content and conversations.
How we decided which reactions to start with
It would’ve been easy for us to look across the landscape of existing reactions that you see in other apps and just copy those into Yammer. However, we wanted to take a more thoughtful approach and make sure that Yammer reactions were expressive, meaningful, constructive, and globally understood.
The first phase of developing this new feature involved conducting global research through surveys and interviews to identify the reactions that would be most helpful to our users and community managers. We also looked at feedback and top GIF usage to identify signals on how users are expressing themselves today. The next phase was to help us deliver on our goal of being universally understood. So we reached out to users to ensure our icons communicated the same sentiment to all users. Armed with this data, we finally had the reaction set for Yammer.
Different reactions to Yammer conversations
You can now ‘love’ a post that deeply resonates with you, or ‘celebrate’ a personal or professional milestone. With ‘thank’, you can express your appreciation towards a person or a situation, helping build a sense of gratitude within your communities. ’Sad’ would let you express compassion in difficult times, or express sadness over a situation when words fail you. We hope these reactions add a little bit of delight, and help you feel more connected to your Yammer communities. We will continue to listen and learn from your feedback so you can be your most expressive self on Yammer.
General availability starts now!
Reactions are starting to roll out today, and will be available to all users globally in the next couple of weeks. To add a reaction, hover on the like button on web or hold down the like button on mobile, to see the reaction options of like, love, laugh, celebrate, thank and sad show up. Then tap or click on one of these to select them. Learn more at our support page.
What’s next?
Yammer is inclusive by design, with communities and conversations at the center. And we continue to think about inclusive features as we build new features. Soon we will be introducing diverse skin tones on reactions to help every reaction feel sense of representation while interacting on Yammer.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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