Idea: Include Stories in messaging product with Stories preview, multiple post thumbnails & share to Story in selector (#61)

Purpose is to enable people to share to their contacts with a focus on media.

Published in

D.J. Sherrets

4 min readMar 2, 2016

Snapchat started as one-to-one messaging and then made “Stories” available as a way to share to your friends easily. This is essentially a feed product in that it is one-to-many people.
WhatsApp has a “broadcast” feature that sends a one-to-one message to a list of people. There is no feature for posting something that is only visible to people who visit the WhatsApp app.
Other chat apps allow for sharing to a list of friends.
Some chat apps don’t have a feature to share to friends and there’s an opportunity to provide that.

Start on the Messages list of the messaging app. Note that the left side shows profile photos for the people who have posted Stories, so you can just tap on one of those people to view their Story, and reason for that is so easier to access Stories without hiding behind a swipe. Tap on the profile photo to the left of “Person 12” which opens the Story of “Person 4.”
Swipe down on Person 4’s Story #1 which takes you Stories view. Note that the squares are photo thumbnails of Stories. Tap on Person 4 again to go back to view Person 4’s Story #1.
Swipe down on Person 4’s Story #1 to return to Story view, and note that Story #1 animates off the screen because you have watched long enough for the Story to go away.
Tap on Messages to switch views, then tap back to Stories.
Tap on the create message button in the corner.
Tap on “Share to My Story” and “Person 10” as recipients.
Tap “Camera” then tap to make photo, then tap “Send” in the corner. Note that you are taken to the Stories view and “My Story” animates in showing the thumbnail of the photo you made.
Tap on “Messages” to see that “Just now” the message to Person 10 was sent.

Opportunity is to provide a space for people to share to a bigger audience.
Still uses existing typical flow for how to select friends.
Default for viewing Stories is for people you messaged in the last 6 months except for people you add to a list who you don’t want to view.
Alternatively, setting can enable user to select other ways to determine who sees My Story, such as changing how long of time ago since you messaged someone, a threshold for frequency of messaging, whether you look at their Stories, etc.
Main point about how to determine who can view the Story is to do something other than a static list of friends. Reason is to account for friends changing over time and so people sharing can be comfortable with sharing over time.
The blue on the Stories square thumbnails indicates that there is text. Alternatively, there are probably better ways to indicate that there is text available to be viewed.