UX case study: trying to solve “contact joined telegram” chat feature of telegram

I recently attended the UX Kickstarter Workshop organised by Growth School and Anudeep Ayyagari. It was an amazing workshop with 15 days filled with tasks and great learnings.

Problem Statement

For those who are unaware, Telegram automatically establishes a conversation with contacts who are brand-new to the platform, along with a sentence informing you that the contact has only recently signed up. If you’d like, you can use this feature to quickly start a chat with your recently registered contact.

But most of the time, I find this to be a big annoyance. I’m not sure about you, but I rarely ever tap one of these conversations to start a conversation with a new contact. Although you may disable the notification, you can’t truly stop the service from starting new conversations in the first place.

Sadly, it appears that turning off contact sync completely is the only way to remove this “contact joined Telegram” capability. But this results in contacts who message you for the first time simply showing up as a number, which isn’t really a solution at all.

Solution

This was the final design, which helps to reduce the chats (unimportant clutter) in one click, from the screen and makes it more clean.

I added the 3 dot menu to help make it really easy to clear the chats. The chats are categorized into personal and group sections.

This redesign helps the user to find a more clean screen. This improves the efficiency and makes it more minimalist and gives less distractions to the user. According to Hick’s Law, lesser the chats the more it makes it simple and faster to do what the user wants to do. This also reduces the session length by deleting the not required chats.

Here is a link to - High Fidility Prototype

User Centric Designs

During the Workshop, we had an exercise on the Heuristic Principles in a very non textbook manner, where we looked into Swiggy and tried to understand the perspective of the UX Designer and why the designer did what he/she did.

I used that similar concept to evaluate Telegram.

1. I really like that Telegram sends messages to notify the updates. This makes it very easy to understand if there are any new features for the user to know.
2. I also like the 5 second undo feature that telegram provides to undo any mistakes, an ability to correct mistakes.
3. The next unread messages profile will appear by pulling up the end of each chat or channel.

I was really annoyed by the chats that appeared of the contacts who had just joined telegram. After googling I found out there was no actual solution provided to this. And the Chat screen was way too cluttered.

In one of Anudeep’s lecture he said it doesn’t mattered how small the problem is that you choose to solve, your solution should improve the user experience. Thats exactly what I did.

After doing a little bit of secondary research I found this poll, out of 713 votes 84% people did not like that feature.

Paper Prototype

Here is a link to the Paper Prototype in Marvel

Usability Testing

After testing on 2 users, one random stranger and a friend, I got these observations.

User Flow

1. View the different categories of the chats

2. Try to delete the contacts just joined telegram chats

3. Visit the all chats section.

Observations

Final Changes

After the observations I got to know that users are used to (Jakob’s Law) the swiping feature to move from one category to another. Another observation was user wasn’t aware of the new feature I had introduced which might go unused but this can be made aware to the users by adding it into the instructions of the new chat created or a message from telegram.

Changes made -

1. Swipe added to navigate through different categories.

2. The 3 dot menu also made available in all chats section.

Key Learnings

By doing the Kickstarter workshop one thing I learned is it is really easy to learn one small thing a day and if you do that consistently it becomes a habit and also at the end of 15 days you have learned so many amazing things.

Design is everywhere. You just have to learn to look for it in a UX Designer Perpective, which is exactly what Anudeep made me realise. One thing that has changed in me is how I look at apps or websites, there are just so many questions. Why is this places here? What is the need of this element? Is there any way this feature can be improved? and many more.

📧 Get in touch with me: bedmutha.riddhi@gmail.com
➡️ Follow Riddhi Bedmutha
🔗 Find me on Linkedin | Behance