Could WhatsApp’s Voice Note Experience Be Better?
A problem I have had with sending voice notes on WhatsApp is the fact that I don’t get to ‘Preview’ the Voice Notes before sending them thereby taking the huge risk of sounding awful in Voice Notes (I actually do, btw😕).
Note: The views in this write-up are strictly mine. It serves as an effort in identifying user experience problems and attempting to solve them.
Now, that is out of the way, let’s get to the fun part!☺
FINDING A NEED
First, I did a survey with friends that are existing users of WhatsApp (and chronic ‘Voice Noters’) to find out what they feel about the existing process of sending Voice Notes on WhatsApp.
Total Group Size: 8
I discovered that the inability to play a voice note before sending it out was a pain-point. I look to solve that problem with this redesign. My approach was to make minimal changes to WhatsApp’s current flow for sending Voice Notes to maintain User familiarity.
I swapped the ‘Slide to cancel’ delete feature to a ‘Slide to listen’ preview feature.
MOCK-UPS
Basically, I was able to come up with a probable solution. Have a look:
User long presses the microphone icon to start recording Voice Notes.
At the end of the recording, User slides the microphone icon to the Left (just as it currently works for the ‘Cancel’ option).
User previews Voice Note before sending.
Previewing voice notes allows the user to Pause and Play before sending.
User can choose to delete voice note and send another one if the playback wasn’t satisfactory.
Check out a video of the Prototype:
Conclusion
For me, this was good practice for Problem Identification in User Experience. For you, hope it was a good read, if it was, don’t forget to Share, Clap and Comment.
Until next time, That’s all folks!👋
