Elaborating on a less stressful way to text

Storyboarding and wireflows for a story-based digest of unread messages

Some background context

Our team project aims to make texting back on time a habit. In our intervention study, our hypothesis was user-directed notification management might help realize this. It turned out not to be true: participants were actually more stressed and didn’t really change how much they replied.

Reviewing our system map, participants were probably overwhelmed because nearly every factor into texting is additive in nature—tasking users with also actively managing notifications only introduced one more part to this overloaded dynamic.

A whole lot of red, not a lot of blue.

Therefore, our focus shifted to how we might be able to actively remove some of the inputs into the system. For instance, design a product to reduce unmerited perception of urgency, or eliminate the always-on stream of reminders to reply. That’s where one of our top ideas from last week landed us: an Insta story-like, end-of-day summary of highlights from texts that need replies.

Last week’s top idea.

The storyboard: how and when would people use this?

Here’s how I imagined the user might fit the concept, which I named “Textie” (your texting bestie, har har) into the scope of their daily workflow.

Created with StoryboardThat, an amazingly useful tool for this kind of stuff.

Textie could work by deferring notifications while it’s most important to be undistracted and least stressed. At a later time when users have the headspace for it, Textie re-surfaces missed messages in a digestible swipe-through story reel. This does two things:

1. It prevents unreads from becoming an ineffective mental note to reply later. There’s an explicit (but one time) call to action to get texting done that intervenes at the right time.
2. It grants users the superpower of typing those replies in a frictionless way. The interaction design makes progressing through each conversation as easy scrolling through social media.

Imagining the Textie user interface

The biggest unknown was how exactly texts could be portrayed in story form. Swipe-away screens of content are pretty ubiquitous nowadays, but they are mostly for short videos, not text conversations. Some questions to answer were:

1. How would we signify a swipe-through, story-like format for atypical content? Others benefit from details like rounded frames around video, progress bars, or a vignette. What fits for messaging UI?
2. What actions should users be able to take in that bottom screen space? In TikTok, for instance, you can see the poster profile, comment, or like. What do texters need to craft good replies?
3. How do users progress? Is a horizontal carousel better? A vertical scroll? What makes it feel delightful, like you’re really achieving progress on your task?

Here’s a breakdown of what I came up with:

• Welcome screen: What users open to when it’s summary time. It gives them an expectation of what to look forward to accomplishing (number of unreads) and primes them for the interaction to navigate it.
• Conversation, the bread-and-butter of the platform. It contains a title, the most recent messages, a reply field with a more actionable prompt than a blank space (“What do you think?”), and some core actions on the bottom described in the following two points.
• Respond later, a choice that makes delaying until later accountable to specific moments a user might preferentially identify in onboarding. This is a lot better than abstractly saying to yourself you’ll get back to someone in an hour, whatever that means.
• Text highlights, a feature that scrolls to the hottest parts of a long convo threads, which might otherwise require a laborious read-through of the entire message history. One way to get this might be to measure messages per minute, and show the sections of a conversation with the highest activity.
• Progress bar, a quick way to contextualize where you’re at in the total conversation stack for that day. Pushed to the bottom of the interface to indicate that it’s a global measure, not related to how many screens there are per contact (as it is in something like Instagram).
• Story transition, for how users move forward. I chose a horizontal swipe through as conversations might demand some internal up-and-down scrolling, disqualifying a TikTok-esque vertical progression. A visible shadow makes it seem like you’re physically removing attended-to convos, creating the feeling of satisfaction for getting something done each time.
• End-of-stack summary, which gives a reassuring message from Textie showing users how well they did at answering during the session.
• Congrats, a final closing message that sets up an expectation for returning to Textie day after day.

I’m excited to continue developing this idea in collaboration with my teammates ideas and with some feedback from our users!