Re-design awarding emoji UI

Awarding emoji for a comment is not intuitive. It is in the top right corner. Is there a better design? In Facebook, the call to action is right below the comment. In Slack, when you mouseover the message, there is a popup with UI.
Currently, clicking the existing the UI takes a few seconds the first time (at least on gitlab.com), before there's a popup with emoji to select from. This needs performance improvements.
Which should be fixed first? If we re-design and re-implement the the awarding emoji UI, will the performance problems go away?