Polling feature in WhatsApp — 24 Hr UX Challenge
It was the time of September 2018, when I received this challenge for a summer internship opportunity at a FinTech company. So clear by the title only, it was a 24 Hr challenge and on the top of it I had my mid-semester exams 2 days later. So, yeah I was nervous and excited both and here I am sharing my experience of those 24 hrs.
Challenge
Imagine, you are a part of WhatsApp’s Design team. The team plans to release a new feature, “Polls” in group chats and you are working on this feature as a Product Designer. Few things that are going to be part of the flow which your solution has to cover:
- Creation of a poll by a user in a group
- Other users being able to vote for the poll
- Displaying and sharing results
- Any use cases or edge cases to be handled
- Anything additional required for a great experience
Process
Research
WhatsApp is a great platform for instant messaging and is used by a wide variety of audiences. It’s group chat feature allows to discuss on various issues and pass on different kind of informations. But it was really necessary to understand the use cases of polling in groups but first of all it was necessary to understand the ‘Polls’ itself and to be specific ‘Polls on social media’.
Competitive Analysis
I identified the social media platforms where a Polling feature exists. The platforms I analysed were Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
Facebook has 3 different cases of polling : in News feed, in Facebook group and in messenger group chat. During my assignment I missed out on messenger group chat because I didn’t use it much and wasn’t aware of it. But I am adding it here for better insights.
I broke down whole competitive analysis in 4 major aspects of polling.
After the competitive analysis I came up with some questions. Mostly these questions were based on the above analysis and some were to know about the user behaviour.
As there was crunch of time it was not possible for me to think of a solution to cater to all the needs. So I made an assumption.
Assumption : Everyone trusts each other in the group and is not afraid of putting up their opinion openly in front of each-other.
Analyse
After the research I had a fair idea about the target audience and problems needs to be solved. So I started by building personas and user stories to come up with defined solutions.
Now, these stories are highly influenced by my surroundings but in my opinion they are relevant to other surroundings also.
Ideate
After all this I started building the flow for the polling feature.
Final Design
I prepared a few very rough sketches on paper only as I was running low on time. So I directly started designing final UI.
Learnings
Competitive Analysis : It is a good approach to start the research if there is something similar already existing in the market to get better insights on problems.
Prioritising tasks : Every-time its not possible to design a solution that solves all the problems in a single go. We need to select the problems which are more persisting and design a solution which can solve most of them and is efficient in longer run.
Conclusion
This challenge was very interesting and made me realise what do I enjoy. There is still a lot more scope left in this solution but I learned a lot while doing this.
Thank you for giving it a read. It means a lot.
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!
