Idea: Note time since message viewed & sent with option to notify right away or some time after your message is viewed (#63)
Purpose is to enable people to quickly see what the responsiveness is of a given person as well as to get a notification to follow-up if no reply.
Published in
4 min readMar 3, 2016
Messaging today:
- Many messaging apps show when the recipient has viewed a message.
- Seeing if someone has viewed a message is available by opening the messaging app.
- Some email tools allow for notification if someone has viewed a message.
Proposed idea:
- Start on Messages tab of the messaging app. Tap on “Person 1” to view unread message. Note that the text under each message says “Sent (time) ago & (time) after they viewed” or “Sent (time) ago & (time) after you viewed.”
- Tap on “Text” then enter a message then tap “Send.” Note that the link “Notify after view” appears after “Sent just now & 3s after you viewed.”
- Tap on “Notify after view.” Default is 4 hours after a message is viewed. Alternatively, default can change to whatever the person has used last.
- Tap on “10m” for 10 minutes after view with reason being to get a notification pretty soon after the person sees the message.
- Close app to home screen on phone. Then 15 minutes pass and a notification appears that 10 minutes ago Person 1 viewed your message because Person 1 looked at your message 5 minutes after you sent the message.
- Tap on the notification. Note that the link text changed to “Viewed 10m ago.”
- Tap on “Viewed 10m ago” to get notified later. Or tap “Cancel notify” to close. Note that “2m” and “10m” are light gray to indicate those options aren’t available any more. Reason is so you can find out later such as in case you hope to get a reply but know you need to message back to the person in case of coordinating the party. Default to 4 hours, or whatever is after how much time has passed.
Comments:
- Opportunity is to enable people to help try to interact and manage those interactions. Sometimes messages require follow-up, and so notifying about viewing is helpful.
- Also an opportunity to highlight how long people take to reply since viewing. Of course there are many reasons to wait to reply for something or not. Main point is that this information may be useful and relevant for people to consider about time spent to reply. Benefits of this could be related to benefits to increased sharing speed that happened when read receipts were added to Messenger.
- If you turn on a notification for some time after your message is viewed, then you are not ntoified if that person does reply to you because you will have received a notification about their reply.
- Alternatively, there can be a setting to allow people to choose not to share time from when viewing.
- Alternatively, show aggregate data per conversation and across all conversations for how quickly someone tends to reply after viewing.
- The option to notify “Now” upon a message being viewed is to notify immediately when the message being viewed. Opportunity is to enable people to enter the conversation at the same time and discuss what makes sense. Reason for right away may include that you are seeking to have a live conversation and interacting at the point that person is in the conversation could be most relevant.
- Provide a link to select a specific time later to be notified.
- Reasoning to default viewing notification to something around 2 minutes is so that way the recipient has an opportunity to respond and so that may be the notification received which is more actionable and worthwhile to look at a notification.
- Also, consider “viewing” based on data that includes knowing when someone views notifications on their lock screen.
- Alternatively, identify when some users have something such as email notifications on so you know that what you sent may have been viewed.
- Alternatively, the “notify” selection could be done from the Messages list and swiping right to left then selecting a button such as “Notify.”
© 2016 D.J. Sherrets
