Never underestimate the importance of microinteractions

One of the most memorable projects in my career happened a long time ago. I was working on a user-generated content platform, improving a question-and-answer feature. We needed a better way to assess comment quality, both to improve the experience for paying customers and to decide what content should be surfaced for SEO and CRO outside the paywall.

At the time, the like button itself was still new to the internet. We experimented with adding one as a frictionless quality signal, but it didn’t work for us. Incorrect, incomplete, or low-quality answers were often upvoted. Popular didn’t always mean correct.

We considered several alternatives such as additional reactions, star ratings, downvoting, and conversation threading, but none produced clearer signals or better outcomes. We took a step back to reflect upon the problem we were trying to solve: what would give us the clearest indicator of content quality?

Originally, we believed the like button would be easier for non-native English speakers and international audiences. You don’t need to know words to understand symbols. That’s true, but sometimes it’s important to add context using words.

We replaced the like button with a plain-text prompt: “Was this your solution?” It removed the ambiguity entirely. It clarified why someone should use the button and helped steer the interaction around that intent.

We also changed the interaction into a multi-step process. After someone clicked “Was this your solution?”, they were prompted with a dropdown to provide more detail about why. This gave us more than a simple quality signal. People could assign partial credit, flag something as incorrect, risky, a bad practice, or deprecated, or mark it as their solution even if the community disagreed. Each option mapped to a different outcome.

The results exceeded our expectations. We got clearly actionable data, a much better user experience, higher customer satisfaction, and improved community perception.

All we had to do was focus on one tiny but important detail.