Enhancing WhatsApp’s Features
You know a company has reached a pinnacle when it becomes a verb. “Can you WhatsApp it to me?”
Unfortunately that isn’t the case in America. But I spent my childhood in Indonesia, where WhatsApp is the dominating instant messaging app. Whether it’s communicating with an Indonesian in Indonesia or abroad, it’s implied that this communication will take place over WhatsApp.
I wondered why this is the case. Of course there are other apps, like Facebook Messenger, or iMessage, or LINE (another popular messaging app in Indonesia). But my personal reasons for choosing WhatsApp are because:
- WhatsApp works across devices (unlike iPhone-only iMessage)
- WhatsApp feels most secure (unlike Messenger, which is directly associated to your Facebook account) (plus, WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption)
- WhatsApp is simple and no-fuss (unlike LINE, which I find to be overwhelming and distracting)
But, of course, my subjective reasons are not suffice to generalize 1.3 billion WhatsApp users. To understand deeper about WhatsApp users, or at least a niche, I needed to put my research skills to the test. I wanted to go in depth as to why people choose WhatsApp over other apps. In addition, I wanted to know what people dislike about WhatsApp. And as a final step, I prototyped my solutions using Framer.
Phase 1: gathering data
My method was to conduct a qualitative study with five existing users. According to this article and my experience conducting usability studies, five is the magic number to detect 85% of problems in an interface and to garner significant results.
I asked my participants broad questions such as:
- Why WhatsApp?
- What features do you use most? What don’t you use?
- What do you like about Whatsapp? What don’t you like?
The reason I began with broad questions was to be as unbiased as possible and avoid leading them into me answers that I wanted. I asked follow-up questions that went further into detail. For example, after asking “what features do you use the most?” I would ask, “why do you use these features the most?” If I were to ask the latter question first, I would be assuming this information.
The good
When I asked the participants the reason why they choose WhatsApp over other messaging apps, the pattern I found is that they view the app to be universal–whether it’s to contact their family and friends, people from work, or even their professors. In other words, they feel comfortable using WhatsApp in both an informal and a formal context.
It’s clear that the participants value their safety and seek for convenience. When I asked them to tell me three words that describe WhatsApp, I received positive words such as professional, universal, convenient, safe, and easy.
The bad
I was also told by two of my participants that they dislike the lack of organization in WhatsApp. One participant used Slack as an example of an organized system with their “Channels” function.
The ugly
One thing that was clear from my five interviews is that all five of the participants wanted the “Status” function to be removed, explaining to me that there are other apps for sharing 24-hour disappearing photos and videos. They said their main purpose on WhatsApp is to send messages and make calls, and that this function is irrelevant to WhatsApp’s core brand.
Phase 2: redesign
The first step of redesigning the app was to understand WhatsApp’s target users. After all, WhatsApp is a global app whose top markets range far and wide, which made for an interesting project. So how can I design something anyone can understand intuitively by improving what they already have?
Design improvement #1: Removing Status and Camera
One clear finding I found from the participants’ responses is that they primarily use WhatsApp to message and make calls–and that they really dislike the Status function. In WhatsApp, Status is a feature that works much like Snapchat. And because of its terminology, one participant mistook Status to be what WhatsApp calls About. From this, I concluded that Status and Camera were two features that could be eliminated from the app’s main landing page. WhatsApp’s current layout of the bottom navigation bar includes Status, Calls, Camera, Chats, and Settings, respectively. With Camera right in the center of the navigation bar, it suggests that the camera function should be an important feature of the app that people often use–which it isn’t.
Design improvement #2: Implementing an Add button
In terms of organization, one solution could be to include an Add button to initiate a new conversation. This way, instead of clicking “new chat” and having to navigate to a different page, the user can simply do so on one page. The user would be able to create a new chat or a new group within this option. The less cognitive load, the better.
Design improvement #3: Swipe to navigate
In my opinion, WhatsApp can use a better interaction experience to improve the app’s navigation flow. It doesn’t need to be anything very animated–since that would detract from WhatsApp’s simplicity–but perhaps more subtle changes. One example is adding the ability to swipe into a chat page so that a user can seamlessly navigate back and forth with a single motion.
Design improvement #4: Swipe left to access options
As of right now, swiping left on a chat leads to two options; Unread and Pin. Swiping right leads to More and Archive. This structure further illustrates the lack of organization within the app. Instead of placing some options on swipe left and some on swipe right, WhatsApp can simply group them together on one side. By grouping everything under More, users shouldn’t have to try to struggle to find an option.
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