UX Case Study: Make WhatsApp a little more comfortable
So I was asked to choose any app that I use and think of ways to improve its user experience. I chose WhatsApp and I promise you this is not going to be some redesign or anything of that sort. This case study is about solving the existing pain points of the user to provide a better user experience.
What is WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is an online social media platform founded by Brian Acton in 2009. Currently, WhatsApp has over 2.5 billion users from all over the world. Not only can use it to chat, but WhatsApp can also be used to make calls, video calls, and even update status. Its best feature has to be instant messaging.
Getting Started
I have been using this app since I got my own mobile phone. WhatsApp is the app that has to be there on your phone. Why did I choose it? Because WhatsApp is the social media that I use most of the time. It is delightfully easy to use and very helpful for people’s communication, WhatsApp avoids any unnecessary features and that is what makes it so easy to use, of course, as sophisticated as an application there is always a scope of betterment. As a longtime user of WhatsApp myself, I experienced some pain points, considering those pain points I try to think about how it can be improved.
Who is the User?
The first step was to understand my users of course. And here is the first difficulty: WhatsApp users seem to be a pretty large target group!
Indeed, there are 2.5 billion WhatsApp users around the globe, mainly between 18 and 44 years old. It is used in more than 180 countries in 60 different languages. 400 mn people in India use WhatsApp. You can find whatsapp installed in the phone of people of any age group.
What’s the problem?
While Whatsapp is great for instant messaging and group chat, I think it might use some updated features. Some problems that I face while using WhatsApp -
1. Scanability in WhatApp chat is poor. Group chats and normal chats are all mixed up. There’s no way to easily scan for group chats in WhatsApp except search and scroll through the end. You can’t categorize your chats or make them distinctive. Wouldn’t it be great if there’s some way to distinguish between the normal chats and group chats which will save time and trouble to search and scroll?
2. When you mute a group chat, WhatsApp still shows me the number of messages I am missing out on. This creates a FOMO, and I check the messages anyway, which leads to frustration and time wasted.
3. If you are the kind of person who has a lot of contacts on WhatsApp and your inbox is always filled with new chats then there is a slight chance that some chats might be left unread. There is not any feature on WhatsApp through which you can check all the unread chats in one place. You have to scroll through the whole inbox to find unread chats.
Talking to the User
The above mentioned are the problems that I pointed out and I believe that they can be improved to give the users a nice and better experience. While writing down these problems, I got curious and thought I am the only one who faces these issues or the other people who use WhatsApp do too.
The good thing about a well-known app is that you can easily find users to talk to. So I spoke to ten people in my circle who use WhatsApp, and I found out that I was not the only one who thinks that WhatsApp could improve.
9 out of 10 said they do empathize with me on problem number 1
8 out of 10 said they do empathize with me on problem number 2
4 out of 10 said they do empathize with me on problem number 3
Apart from that while talking to people I stumbled upon another problem that is you can’t send a message to a person without saving his/her number on Whatsapp first.
Consider a scenario where you quickly have to send some important documents to a person you don't know personally on WhatsApp but there’s no way for you to send it without saving his/her contact number. When I asked people to state their concern regarding saving someone’s contact number first to send a message on WhatsApp, they told me that privacy is a big concern here because profile pictures and the about me section are kinda personal things and they don’t want some random person to see their profile picture and the about me section.
I decided to make this problem number fourth to solve.
4. In WhatsApp it's mandatory to save a person’s contact number first to send a message. This is not a very favorable situation where for some reason you want to send a message to a person you don’t know personally or you just don’t want to save anyone’s number yet.
What’s the Solution?
I didn’t want to make this case study lengthy so I decided to jump to the solution after talking to users and discussing the problems. The solution to the above-mentioned problems is quite straightforward. WhatsApp needs to introduce some new functionalities to provide a better user experience.
Problem 1
While talking about the issue where group chat and normal chat are mixed up in WhatsApp, I first tried to figure out how the competitors are doing it. I only use one app other than WhatsApp which is Telegram. Telegram has come up with a wonderful solution for this problem. Telegram lets you make folders and put chats in them and that folder is visible as a tab. You can make different folders as per your need and categorize your chats. I loved this feature of telegram.
I was aiming for something like this but not exactly this.
Problem Statement - How might I enable users to distinguish or categorize group and normal chats on WhatsApp?
I brainstormed about the possible ideas. I come up with a bunch of solutions.
- There could be a default word “GROUP" written in front of each group’s name to distinguish the group chats from normal chats. That way it would be easy to scan for group chats.
- WhatsApp can use the feature “Assign a color" where you can categorize the group chats by assigning a color to them. Assigning a color will make the Group chat more distinguishable from normal chats.
- Assigning a color to a group chat will also change the message counter's color, which will help differentiate each group chat.
These functions will save time and help organize chats better.
Problem 2
Problem Statement- How might I help users to get less distracted by the muted WhatsApp chats?
We mute a chat on WhatsApp because either it is not relevant to us or we don’t want to get distracted by loads of messages but what’s the point if you can still see the number of messages you are missing.
- In the existing mute notifications feature, WhatsApp can introduce a feature “block notifications” which if selected will block the notifications and won’t give you the count of messages you are missing.
- This feature will help the user save time that gets wasted by opening the muted chat and reading messages.
- This will help the user in getting less distracted while using WhatsApp.
Problem 3
Problem Statement - How might I enable the user to see all unread messages in one place?
WhatsApp can introduce a feature “Unread messages” where you can see all the unread chats in one place. You just click on that button and WhatsApp will filter all unread messages for you in one place so that you won’t have to scroll through chats to find the unread messages. This feature will save time and effort.
Problem 4
Problem statement- How might I enable the users to send a message to a person without saving his/her contact number?
I brainstormed possible solutions for this problem. I came up with a feature “Random Chat" which will let the user send a message to a person without saving his/her number.
- This is like saving a contact number but saving a name is totally an option.
- The main thing Random Chat will do is to let you chat with another person and by default, it won’t show your profile picture and about me section to the other person.
- After you have set up a random chat with a person, you can always save his/her number as actual contact.
- When you add a Number for a random chat, it also displays a note to let the user know what will happen if you do a random chat with a person.
This Random chat feature will help with the privacy concern and fulfill the goal that I initially aimed to send a message to a person without saving the contact number.
Feedback
I took feedback on the solutions that I created for the above-specified problems. These are the edge cases that I found out from feedback-
- Lots of apps these days ask for your number to sign up. They might spam with business accounts, in such cases, users should know who is messaging them. Random chat feature should remain ethical so that nobody can spam your WhatsApp.
Improvement based on feedback
- Whatsapp already has a privacy policy and users already have the option to report and block unwanted chats, but to keep the random chat feature more ethical, it should not be available for business accounts. More research should be done to make this available for business accounts. For the part to keep it ethical so that nobody can just spam you, Whatsapp should let the user know upfront about their account report or ban rules.
Conclusion
This was my attempt to add new features to Whatsapp to improve its user experience. WhatsApp indeed is the best messaging app in the market but everything can be made a lil better. These are the features that I would love to have in WhatsApp.
Would love to hear your thoughts about it!
