Facebook Messenger: How it quickly grew to become one of my favorite products.
In April 2014, I was left scratching my head wondering why Facebook would force its users to download a separate app for messaging on iOS and Android. It seemed so unintuitive at the time, and I remember getting a barrage of messages from my friends complaining about this new Facebook update. This was typically the norm: Facebook would make some minor updates to the UI of the platform, everyone goes crazy, and then a week or so passes and everyone is content again. But this was different. This was a major change that was noticeable to every Facebook user, and it was a change that would alter the Facebook experience for years to come. At the time, I didn’t know that this change would soon shape Messenger to become not only one of the most powerful messaging apps on the market, but also one of my favorite products.
Looking back on it now, I definitely think Facebook made one of the best decisions possible for Messenger at the time. The growth of Messenger since its inception as a separate application has stunned me, and the new, innovative features definitely make this product one of my daily drivers. It might have taken a while, but Messenger has finally taken my breath away.
A great time to make bold moves.
When the decision was made to separate Facebook from Messenger, there wasn’t a lot of competition in terms of domestic peer-to-peer messaging applications. AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) was still a thing if you’re old like me and remember having to download software to send messages over the internet, and email just didn’t have the same responsiveness as instant messaging. This was a great time for Facebook to make risky and bold moves because of the lack of substitutes. Even though people might have been annoyed at the time for having to download a separate application, many people did it because there wasn’t much else they could do. If they wanted to switch Messenger to something else, such as the rising power WeChat, they would have to install another application anyways.
Facebook also made promises that this seemingly drastic change would improve the user experience in the long run. Here’s a brief excerpt from a Zuckerberg interview on the topic:
Asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask. I appreciate that that was work and required friction. We wanted to do this because we believe that this is a better experience. Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think.
The primary purpose of the Facebook app is News Feed. Messaging was this behavior people were doing more and more. 10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab. We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. You’re probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.
This is some of the hardest stuff we do, is making these choices. We realize that we have a lot to earn in terms of trust and proving that this standalone messenger experience will be really good. We have some of our most talented people working on this.
Messenger’s Climb to Greatness
Since the separation of Facebook and Messenger, the latter has continually evolved with new features that have emphasized a great user experience.
Messenger Online
Messenger quickly released a separate website for Messenger, messenger.com. This separate entity seemed to follow in the mobile application’s footsteps, adding a degree of separation from the Facebook newsfeed. It was definitely aligned with Zuckerberg’s explanation for the initial separation of mobile apps — Facebook really believed that if you want to use Messenger to talk with friends, especially with the frequency at which humans tend to do this per day, you shouldn’t have to be stuck waiting for the newsfeed to load, even on the full website.
Messenger.com allowed us to have a very responsive messaging-only experience that loaded quicker than the full Facebook site. It also turned out to be great for me personally because as a student, newsfeed is really distracting to me. Having a way to access the core messaging feature I needed without any extraneous distractions was very important to me.
Messenger Lite
The Messenger team continued to strip down their work to create a minimalistic version of the product so that it could also appeal to those with smaller phone and laptop batteries: Messenger Lite. The full messenger app, alongside the regular Facebook app, has been notoriously known for causing battery drain issues due to its background processes, especially on Android. Having a lite version of Messenger that stripped the application down to the core basics and core functionality would achieve the same things that the initial Messenger and Facebook separation achieved. Facebook was separating all of the extraneous Messenger features, such as games, from the core function of the application so that users could have a choice on which experience they liked the best. Messenger Lite ended up being a more battery (and memory) friendly application, and it was quicker at doing its core job: sending and receiving messages.
Ad Integration
Recently, you may have noticed ad integration into Facebook Messenger’s mobile apps…or you might not have. Facebook’s Ad and Messenger teams did a great job at designing their new ad content to fit the theme and feel of the application. All too often, users are bombarded by oddly formatted advertising blocks, or they are shown advertisements that just don’t feel like they belong. This is just another example of how Facebook has focused on the user experience in everything it did with Messenger, especially with the one thing that most people hate with a passion: advertisements.
Chat Heads
With the introduction of chat heads, Facebook was able to cater to fans who liked the integration of Facebook and Messenger in a single app. The chat head was essentially a circle that hovered on your screen even when you used other applications, and it gave easy access to your recent Messenger conversations. This allowed a user to have the regular Facebook newsfeed application open while also having easy access to Messenger, giving the illusion that the two applications were merged once again.
Beyond giving a taste of nostalgia to users, the Messenger chat heads also provided a very useful utility in that it would display even if you opened different mobile applications. It gave users easy access to messages no matter what application was running — one use case that’s typical of me is to open Robinhood to take a look at some of my stocks’ performance, and then message someone using the Messenger chat head about it. I would then exit the chat head and continue browsing Robinhood for other good buys.
Voice Calling and Texting
Now, Messenger allows voice calls too. Soon, customers won’t need to purchase a plan with minutes — they would just need an internet connection and they could actually call and speak with someone on the other end. The funny thing is that in my experience, these calls over Facebook are generally better quality than that of a normal phone call. It really seems like over the years, Messenger has been targeting key areas of performance for the basic level functions of a cell phone and is innovating in these areas. Messenger is trying to make these features better in terms of quality, and it’s also creating a great, cohesive user experience.
On the Android platform, Messenger also had an option to become your phone’s default SMS app, integrating normal texts with its own services.
Wrapping Things Up
Messenger was ultimately able to cater to different types of customers that used the platform differently. Some people only used the messaging service, some people only used the general Facebook app without messaging, and some people used a mix of both. Some people liked the extra features on the full Messenger app, and some people didn’t. There are also many people who use Facebook in all of these ways at different times of the day, and Facebook continues to have the flexibility to cater to these needs. The results of Messenger’s flexibility and user-oriented focus shows in their growth over the years:
Overall, Facebook Messenger has definitely grown into something that I use every single day. It’s really apparent that the engineers working on this have a huge eye for both practicality and design. They’re focused on giving the user the best experience possible, and they understand that this experience varies for different people. With this in mind, they give as much flexibility as possible, and the user-oriented approach is something that I very much admire in this product.
Throughout the journey, Messenger has stayed true to what it initially sought to do: improve the user experience for those using a peer to peer messaging application. The strategy was one that may have caused a slight hiccup in 2014, but since then, Messenger has blown up and never looked back.
