How would you improve WhatsApp?

We all know WhatsApp and use it daily, from young kids to old citizens, everyone found it simple & easy to use. Today, in this article I would be focusing on how can we make WhatsApp more helpful and better.

Source: Google Images

First, a few clarifying questions I would be asking are -

1. What do you mean by improvement? (Consider anything that you feel is most important)
2. Are we talking about both WhatsApp web and application? (No, only mobile application)
3. Any particular country you want me to focus on? (Your choice)
4. Any specific goal we want to achieve this quarter? (Nothing specific)

Now, I would go ahead and discuss my understanding of WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a mobile application used by a different group of folks almost on a daily basis, to chat with their know ones and share memories with each other. For now, I would be focusing on “Engagement” as our main goal, as WhatsApp had already reached all over the world and had good penetration.

User Groups -

Now, WhatsApp is generally used by each segment of the human population, but if we categorize them, then these are the major groups -

• Individuals (Students, Working professionals, Old Age People)
• Business (Brands trying to communicate with their users to upsell/engage with them.

For this activity, I would like to focus on the Student's user group, as being from this group only, I understand pain points, and even though these are the most active users of the platform, focusing on them eventually helps the business & product.

User Pain points -

Major pain points I can think of are (In the user’s voice)-

1. As a student, I found it very difficult to arrange assignments, work, and study-related material on WhatsApp, most of my documents come through WhatsApp only.
2. Sometimes, there are a few chats I directly want to share on my social media but right now I have to take a screenshot and then open insta, in this whole process, sometimes I even forgot to upload the same.
3. I almost forgot many of the assignments to submit on time, also sometimes when my mom asked me to do some work, I’m unable to remember that and in the end, it leads to chaos.

Out of these three pain points, first I would like to see what could be the solutions for these and based upon that will prioritize one or two.

Solutions -

1. We could introduce some kind of tags for the users so that they can easily categorize things. Users can store/tag objects in a specific manner. On searching that particular tag, all documents/files related to that tag will appear in a single place. (Impact: High, Cost: Mid/High)
2. Build a feature, that will allow users to directly share images/files/chats on their social media (Only FB owned, as this will even increase engagement for other products as well). (Impact: High, Cost: Mid)
3. Build a feature, that allows users to remind a message at a particular time, and they can set this functionality on their own. This would help them reminding a message at a particular time. (Impact: Mid, Cost: Mid)

Now, from all these solutions I would prioritize only 1st & 2nd, as the impact is high in these scenarios, although building time is also mid-high, considering user needs for now we can focus on these two.

Measure Success (Metrics to measure) -

1. # of tags created
2. # of documents stored per tag
3. Distribution of storage of diff doc/text message/media in tags
4. Avg no of usage of tags D/W/M
5. Avg no of shares D/W/M

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