Express yourself with reaction emoji

Anthony Hortin

1. Emoji vocabulary
2. Reaction emoji ←

Notion and Slack introduce two uses for emoji. Notion uses emoji as page logos, making lists of page titles easier to browse. This also works for headings within long pages, when you prefix headings with emoji. Meanwhile, you can translate this emoji vocabulary to Slack, and use emoji as message prefixes, to make channels easier to browse.

Slack introduced reaction emoji, which you can also use in Notion page comments. Reaction emoji offer two different opportunities for clearer communication in online collaboration.

1. 👍 Symbolic emoji that form a kind of sign language
2. 😀 Emoji that represent emotions

Both kinds of reaction emoji save time when writing and reading online.

Symbolic responses

Symbolic emoji abbreviate common responses. You save time writing when you can use emoji instead of typing common responses to messages and replies. Readers save time when they get used to these standard responses, and don’t have to read as much text.

Teams can use the following reactions in general discussion, for example:

👍 approved - approved, looks good to me, I agree, okay

💡 aha - I didn’t know that

💯 absolutely - I agree emphatically

🙌 nicely done - good job

🤦 oops - my bad

🤷 shrug - I don’t know, who knows?

🙏 thank you

🤔 thinking - I need to think about that

Teams sometimes explicitly document this kind of emoji sign language. For example, a Slack support channel might use emoji reactions for status and resolution:

👀 looking - I have started looking into this

🎫 ticket - I’ve recorded this in our tracking system

✅ done - someone has now completed this task

❎ not done - we don’t have to do anything there

Emotional reactions

Emoji, in the original emoticon sense of emotion icon, add an emotional layer to online communication. You save time writing when you can use emoji when you want to express emotion, which otherwise requires difficult writing. And unless you write novels, you probably can’t write emotion well, and shouldn’t try.

Emoji lower the stakes for misinterpretation by limiting a team’s emotional vocabulary. Ironically, for people who grew up with a limited ability to express or recognise emotions, this emoji vocabulary may help them achieve richer emotional communication, not less.

We can separate reaction emoji into broad categories - such as more or less positive:

• positive reactions - 😀 😅 😬 😂 😭 😍
• less positive reactions - 😶 😮 😢 😔 🥺 😱 🤮

But more specific interpretations belong to smaller groups of people. Teams who work together online, and especially remote, can use this as an opportunity to build a shared emotional vocabulary.

Emoji dialects

Teams that increase psychological safety can grow their reaction emoji vocabulary. Team members’ increasing confidence that they understand each other creates space for richer emotional expression. They start by increasing the number of emoji they use. They also start substituting emoji, using different emoji for established meanings, such as the replacements 😂 → 😭 → 💀.

Teams reach the next level when they adopt a whole new emoji dialect. For example, blob cat emoji express a much larger set of reaction emotions than standard Unicode emoji. When a team member imports a set of blob cat emoji - or some other dialect - into Slack, you know you have the best colleagues.