Context tags in Whatsapp
Context tags allow Whatsapp users to easily understand what’s going on in group chats without reading each and every message!!
USER RESEARCH . UX DESIGN . VISUAL DESIGN .
Overview
During my internship as a Product Designer at Meta (Facebook), I participated in a company wide hackathon. My teammate and I decided to work on a common problem faced by Whatsapp users while using group chats which could be further extended to Meta’s other chat platform, Messenger. I conducted user research to validate the problem and we designed a solution for it which my hackathon partner developed. We got a chance to present our solution to the most amazing people who were working full-time at Meta and got really good feedback on our solution.
Timeline
2 weeks (July’22)
TEAM MEMBERS
Software Engineer
Product Designer - Me
MY RESPONSIBILITIES
User interviews, Journey maps, Ideation, Sketching, Visual Design, Strategy.
USER RESEARCH
Thoughts on Group chats?
I interviewed 4 users who were frequent users of Whatsapp to understand their experience with group chats, especially the ones which are important to our users and are super active. Our research revealed that...
Active group chats are often flooded with messages.
Users have to read every message to understand the context and outcome of the conversation.
Users are often overwhelmed with the amount of messages they receive on group chats
USER JOURNEY
How are the users feeling?
Based on the insights from the interview, I mapped out a simple user journey to visualize this problem from the user’s perspective.
THE PROBLEM
Group chats are filled with messages!
Many times, larger Whatsapp groups are flooded with messages. The user finds it very difficult to go through each and every message, understand the context or find an important message.
IDEATION
Introducing context tags!
We conducted a brainstorming session and shortlisted an idea that resonated most to the problem. The idea revolved around having labelled tags representing important messages to enhance findability. Any user can search messages using these labelled tags.
WHAT ARE CONTEXT TAGS?
- Labelled tags that provide a summary of the conversation.
- Understand the context of conversation by browsing them
- Find messages associated with a particular tag easily
WHY HASHTAGS?
We decided to identify context tags using a hashtag. In normal chat conversations, people do not use hashtags. So, they can be used specifically to create context tags.
FEEDBACK
Placement of tags was incorrect!
We got some early feedback on our concept from senior leadership and the team. During this, we understood that past experiments with similar efforts negatively impacted our metrics. The height of each chat list should remain fixed and we had to find a workaround.
ITERATION 1
Placing the tags within chats!
Based on the feedback, I decided to move the tags from the home screen to the chat screen. This also ensured that conversation remains on the chat details page and does not over-crowd the chat listing page.
FINAL DESIGNS
Getting context of group conversations easily!
After getting a green signal on our iteration, I started designing high-fidelity screens for this solution. I identified 3 main user journeys: creating context tags, using the tags to understand the conversation in group chats and finding messages belonging to a specific tag
FEATURE 1
Creating context tags
Initially we wanted to automate the creation of context tags but due to the technical feasibility, we decided to provide the users a way of manually creating it.
FEATURE 2
Get context of conversations easily
Now that the people in group chats have tagged their messages using context tags, any user who opens the group chat and finds many messages can simply read the context tags in the chat thread page and understand what’s going on.
FEATURE 3
Finding messages using a context tag
The users can also see list of all the context tags from the group setting page and browse messages within that tag.
FUTURE SCOPE
If we had some more time...
We would automate the creation of context tags. In this, the system will detect the context of the conversation and assign tags to them automatically!
We would also provide a summary of the conversation with the tags so that the user does not need to read every message.
REFLECTION
Tradeoffs for technical feasibility
Since I was working with a software developer very closely during this project, I learned quite a lot about balancing design and technical feasibility. We wanted to develop this concept as soon as possible so we had to make a lot of tradeoffs. One example of this would be automating the creation of context tags. We were not able to develop this feature given the limited time, so we decided to design a manual way of doing this and we presented the automated way as a future scope. While doing this, I was continuously working the developer, getting feedback on my designs to ensure that we design something that is feasible.
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