as a black guy, this article was such a waste of time

Actual conversation that happened at Anchor HQ:

Designer 1: "What color should we make the clap emoji?"

Designer 2: "Use the default one obviously, anything else would be racist."

Designer 1: "That's what I was thinking, got it."

You know what would have been a way more effective use of your time instead of writing a medium article?

You: "Hey hello@anchor.fm, do you guys have any plans to add the option to allow users select their hand clapping emoji color? It'd be a great way for people to add a little personalization to their profiles and better represent the diversity of people using the app. Just a thought!"

Anchor People: "Hey, yeah! That's actually in our roadmap and we're hoping to push that out in the next month."

You: "Neato!"

DN: "Skeu vs Flat? Who cares? Should designers code? Who cares. Spotify has a new typeface? Who cares. Microsoft has a new style guide? Meh. The default emoji has racial implications? BEHOLD, I HAVE MANY OPINIONS ON THIS."

How about, instead of taking offense to a clearly yellow emoji (a colour chosen to fit in with all the other yellow smiley faces) we focus our efforts on eliminating discrimination? Like, actually stop mistreating people.

I really hate narrowmindedness. Which means I hate discrimination with a passion. But it annoys me when people cry wolf too. Grow a thicker skin please. You're taking offense to the colour of a hand-shaped cluster of pixels.

I think it's everyone's job to create a great planet to live on, together. But if you create a fuss about nothing, you're not contributing. 2 sides to this coin. No.1 is obviously to be excellent to eachother. No.2 is not assuming the worst.

Is this a legitimate argument that using the default emoji color is exclusive of certain audiences because a 134 person pool of "white people" typically use it?

That's a bit over the top, right?

Sure, being able to change the color of your clapping hands emoji would be a great feature, and I'm sure they've probably got it in the pipeline. But in the grand scheme of building an entire product, that's a pretty small detail that goes in the "nice to have" category and will be hammered out when they have time.

You're seriously going to waste your time getting your panties in a twist because of that?

Besides, I thought it was generally agreed that in the emojis, white = white, black = black, and yellow = nondescript.

Yall can discuss the validity of this issue all day, but there truth is that actions are being taken by anchor to address the invaluable opportunity to be inclusive in detail rather than on the surface. Before this medium post I'll bet this wasn't a thing for anchor.

Similarly, someone had to speak up when there weren't images or video of black or brown hands holding phones in apple ads - I'm sure it wasn't a big deal to you, but I see a lot of those black hands holding phones with your dribble shots in them nowadays. But I ain't one to gossip. (Thanks Facebook.design)

You should be ashamed if you are here dismissing a person raising a concern about what it's possibly an easy fix to a UI just because it doesn't offend you. But you are forever holding up the banner of UX and the "little big details". I'm disgusted.

Snowflake

or "How to make me stop reading medium articles"

Designer News: Social Justice Edition

Non-yellow emojis were a mistake.

Evident when Slack included a thumbs up one that actually cycles through the skin tones just to stop multicolored thumbs up under every post.

Holy shit, so many people offended by this article...

I've never thought of how a emoji could turn into a user's ethnic metric. I wouldn't even go with the yellow emoji, I would just put a black/white Font Awesome like icon.

yeah wow

While were talking about emoji...

...why do the adolescent emoji all have blonde hair (Male & Female) no matter the skin tone? None of the other emoji do this. Seems much more offensive than default yellow clappy hands.

Plus, the inconsistency drives me nuts. :^)

This dude assumes his solution is the ultimate fix by just letting everyone select their race for their clappy hands. He even suggests using it as a metric for what people identify with so the podcaster can see it.

But the podcaster is the only one to see it. And in order to see the claps you got, they'd have to be broken down by race or shown on a timeline, AND THAT COMPLETELY MISSES THE ENTIRE POINT. It then becomes entirely about race, not what people resonated with.

Ex. Why did I only get one white applause here, and a bunch of black applause here? Should I edit my content for the olive skinned audience?

This also negates the fact that some people gasp may not choose an accurate skin tone to represent themselves, or may STILL stick with the default, thus further skewing the statistics the author believes is the silver bullet. What if most people stay with the default, either out of safety, lack of caring, or because they specifically aren't comfortable sharing? That should be user tested, not fixed via squeaky wheel on Medium.

There's also gender identity, country or city of origin, and a whole lot more is also incredibly relevant. But this isn't a metric service. It's a fucking app to distribute and listen to podcasts.

The point of the hands was a "fun" way to provide feedback to the podcaster that something resonated they said with people. The authors "quick and easy" solution confuses this very simple point and doesn't even begin to critically think of any of the challenges this would represent.

Black representation is an issue, but there needs to be more thought than knee jerk reactions and half-assed product advice. If I was responsible, I'd probably get away from anything depicting skin regardless of abstraction, race is not a simple issue to solve for and this is the wrong context to tackle it in. There are other icons that can be used that show that someone likes something.

by the way, watching actual designers get triggered by this article in the @designernewsbot comments is fun

— でじことdex digital (author of the Medium post) on Twitter

Yup.

Hmmm - I read it and thought "couldn't the emoji color be selected from the skin tone of the avatar"?

Why does it need a setting - surely it should feel "built for you" rather than needing the user to configure that sort of thing...

I'm still waiting for Apple to let me do this in Messages — I should file a radar.