Meh Vote Development
For April Fools day every year, Imgur likes to put out a quirky temporary feature for people to have fun with the platform. And in 2019, I was responsible for developing the "Meh Vote."
Being an form of social media and image/video sharing platform, Imgur has always had the concept of "up" and "down" voting. Essentially, this is their form of liking or disliking content, and directly affects which content is pushed to the top of their discovery page.
For April 1, 2019 (actually ended up being about a week), we introduced the idea of a Meh Vote. "When you don’t hate it, but you don’t love it, make your presence known by giving it a Meh." - Presenting: The Meh Vote. The Virtual Shrug of the Future.
Because at the time I was on the front end development team, I was responsible for developing this feature for the web platform. When clicking on the sideways "meh" vote, a randomized gif would pop up on the screen showing your medium sentiment towards the post.
In addition to implementing this feature itself, I also made an automated process so that users would only get this feature for a limited amount of time. Depending on the users time zone preferences, they would have this third vote option pop up for each of their midnight's on April 1st, and ran the campaign for a few days after that.
The fun April Fool's day "joke," was a huge hit, and the feature that I developed for the website reached 10+ million users, according to Imgur tracking data. This was the first big project I put out into the world on a large scale, and inspired me keep pushing for positive change in the rest of my design/development career. It also reminded me that not everything has to be so serious! 😜
