PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
How would I improve WhatsApp?
A Product Manager’s approach for designing features for WhatsApp to improve its user experience
I have been using WhatsApp for as long as it is out there. But it is still missing some features. Features I desperately need to this date.
As a product manager, you often get asked in job interviews how would you improve WhatsApp? This question is so frequent that you should prepare in advance for it.
If I was hired as a Product Manager into WhatsApp (aka Meta), here is what I would do
Understand the mission & vision of the company
The mission statement of WhatsApp on their website says, “Behind every product decision is our desire to let people communicate anywhere in the world without barriers.”
But there must also be some internal vision as well that a Product Manager would have to use as their north star while making product decisions, something like:
- We do not want to build features that may hurt the existing revenue generated from WhatsApp.
- We are happy to implement features that will help us collect more information about our users and the same time, ensure their data privacy (hopefully).
- We do not want to lose our existing two billion users and are okay not charging them at any point in the future for our service directly.
These are very logical assumptions based on how Facebook operates as a company today:
- The end-users are not charged directly for its services,
- the features allow them to collect more data about users, and finally;
- no company wants to make less revenue YoY
Keeping this in my mind, I would do this next.
Understand its existing revenue sources from WhatsApp
There is an article explaining how WhatsApp makes money as of today. These are the key points into these two categories:
- WhatsApp for Business API
- WhatsApp Pay
However, also be aware that there are rumors about WhatsApp’s plans to monetize the app through Ads in the “Status” section of the app.
Understand the Technology Stack and its limitations
WhatsApp uses Erlang, PHP, Lighttpd, and SoftLayer in its Application and Data Layers. While the information about how their Database Architecture looks is not public, only a PM could probably know once hired.
Having a technical understanding of the WhatsApp infrastructure would enable me to understand the limitations of the technology stack and the implementation challenges that the engineering team may face because of it.
The Features we all need from WhatsApp
I did several customer interviews and surveys across various age groups to survey what features they need to make WhatsApp a better messaging app for them.
Status privacy lists
This one is a personal pain point, a feature request I put out on the Google Play Store reviews to make them consider. Even Instagram lacks this feature, only allowing you to select your “Close Friends” list. Adding this would be a significant improvement and would make status sharing much faster and easier for its users.
“I want to be able to create multiple lists for my status privacy and choose from them before sharing my statuses. For example, some content I would want to share only with my close friends, some with just my family, or some with just my colleagues. To do that, I have to customize my privacy list every time I want to share something, and it is painful to do”
Adding this feature to both WhatsApp and Instagram would improve the user experience of both these apps. You should also let the users select a default list that they use frequently, just like setting default addresses on a shopping app.
The metrics we could track to check its adoption and success are:
- Percentage of users creating lists versus the total number of users
- Increase in the number of users sharing WhatsApp statuses
I would set the minimum criteria for success (MCS) for this feature at 10% of WhatsApp users because, although features like Broadcasting have a low adoption rate, yet are very handy. As a PM, it makes complete sense to add this feature to WhatsApp as it would certainly increase the number of users sharing WhatsApp statuses.
I made a prototype using Canva to imagine what an implementation of this feature would look like in WhatsApp.
Hide the “Online” Status
There is still no way for you to hide the “Online” status from your friends. I feel this is a very legitimate demand from the users.
“I feel compelled to respond to all the people messaging me when I am online. If I do not, it may come off as rude.”
WhatsApp team probably knows this. Hence as a workaround, you cannot view if a user is online or not until you open the chat window. While this does help, some third-party tools allow monitoring if a user is online, which is ideal for stalkers.
While Telegram and Signal allow you to hide the “online” status in the app altogether, WhatsApp still does not give you the control. It may be because disabling the online status reduces the compulsion to use the app for a user. I may be overreaching, but it is significant when your platform has two billion users. Implementing this feature would reduce the amount of time a user spends on the app.
Since a product manager’s goal is to improve metrics, it would not be wise to add this feature as it will reduce user retention and average session duration.
However, I would be happy to put this feature behind a paywall. It would generate additional revenue for WhatsApp at the cost of user retention and session duration. I feel it is a valid trade-off that would make all the stakeholders happy.
Message reactions
We are all spoilt by Instagram’s message reactions, and still are waiting for WhatsApp to support them. However, it is rumored that the team is working on the feature as of March 2022.
“Being a member of a WhatsApp group is tough. Whenever a user sends a message to the group which requires some form of acknowledgment, my phone starts vibrating and beeping like it is an emergency, because everyone is flooding the group with acknowledgments”
This feature is valuable because only the sender receives a notification when group members use reactions, without notifying everybody else in the group until someone wants to check them.
This feature is a must as WhatsApp knows how popular the message react button is used on apps like Instagram and Messenger and would not have to reconsider the “feasibility” of such a feature for the app.
Better video sharing
Video sharing on WhatsApp needs a lot of improvements. It has these problems at present:
- The maximum video file size limit that can be uploaded is 16 megabytes.
- Longer videos get trimmed even before the upload starts.
- It is inconvenient as you rely on external cloud services to upload the video manually before sharing.
This 16 megabytes limit probably exists so that the uploaded media can be compressed and stored faster before being shared with the receiver. Large videos would imply more processing power and storage (or infrastructure) required for a video, which would cost more to WhatsApp. Hence, this is not ideal.
While it is harder to find a solution to minimize storage and processing cost for videos, WhatsApp could choose to at least take away the pain of uploading longer videos by:
- Allow uploading large videos to WhatsApp, and then recover the costs directly from the sender by charging them fees for storage; or
- Allow users to integrate their cloud storage services with WhatsApp.
Once the user integrates the cloud service with WhatsApp, they should be able to upload the video directly to WhatsApp. The app should then automatically upload the video to the user’s cloud storage and share a preview in the chat with the link to the receiver.
I would be more inclined to let users integrate their cloud service providers into the app versus paying WhatsApp for the service. Doing so would make the user experience smoother without costing too much to WhatsApp.
Group admin controls
If you are the admin of a WhatsApp group, chances are you must know the lack of control you have over them. The problems currently are:
- The admin cannot ban a user from sending messages in the group chat.
- The admin cannot delete a rogue message a user has sent to the group chat.
- Lack of bot integrations and automation into WhatsApp groups.
- Lack of creating sub-groups/channels inside groups to streamline communication.
This is where competitors like Telegram, Discord, Reddit thrive and have the edge over WhatsApp, providing granular control to group admins and moderators on their group(s).
Preventing accidental voice & video calls
Have you ever accidentally video called someone you did not mean to while stalking them? It happened to me last night, again.
It is hard to believe WhatsApp has not received complaints about accidental video calls while trying to use the kebab menu button on a chat. Or have they not spotted it yet? It is not an easy pain point to validate using metrics alone. You may need to observe this in UI/UX interviews.
However, a specific way to spot this would be to observe what percentage of users first click on the video call button and then immediately use the end call button (because of instincts) followed by the kebab menu. A high correlation among these three metrics would help WhatsApp spot what percentage of users face this problem and take action on resolving it.
To resolve this, adding a confirmation step after the video call icon is tapped would be good. Alternatively, a user could be given 2–3 seconds to cancel before the call is actually made.
It would stop accidental calls altogether and save users (such as me) from further embarrassment :D
Features WhatsApp may never build and why
Screen Share
Screenshare is one of those convenience features that many users want on WhatsApp. However, it is a distant dream for now because WhatsApp is a messaging application, not a collaboration tool. This positioning allows WhatsApp to ignore features required in a collaborative work environment. Unfortunately, screen sharing is one of them.
However, Meta also needs to differentiate WhatsApp from its collaboration platform Workplace, which has features such as screen sharing, meetings, calendars, etc.
Multi-Account Login & Logout
We all want to be able to use multiple WhatsApp accounts without giving away our phone numbers, right? We also want to be able to create multiple WhatsApp accounts. Unfortunately, It is not going to happen as well.
The reason is WhatsApp knows it is a robust identity verification service. This power combined with all the information it collects from its other social media platforms (i.e. Instagram and Facebook), makes it the best data aggregator company. It allows them to show relevant advertisements to users with pinpoint accuracy, which is critical to the company’s success.
Meta is an advertising company. As a product manager, remembering this is important. Hence, expecting WhatsApp to let you create multiple accounts or use its service without phone number conflicts with their business model. This reason makes these features unlikely to be built into WhatsApp.
Some other features requested by the users
These were some of the features that also came up in user interviews, and I would love to speculate and maybe think about them in the future. They aren’t perfect, but still, it is good to be aware that users are asking for this. Here are they:
- Showing users the number of times their friends viewed a WhatsApp status
- Notify who blocked you
- Calling and Texting without saving contact info
- Notify when your friends are online
- Separate tabs for groups and direct chats
- Muting all group notifications, except those sent by a few users.
What others features do you think WhatsApp should consider adding to its application? Let us talk about it in the comments!
Hi, I am Roshan Raj Mishra, a product enthusiast. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can also email me at mishraroshanraj@gmail.com
