Enhancing chatting experience
2 weeks
How do I start this?
I started this as a personal school project. I picked WhatsApps as my research topic is because it is the most used communication app ranging from friends, family and co-workers. It triggers me to think, what make Whatsapp famous and is it a perfect app? What I can do to enhance it?
About Whatsapp
WhatsApp is the No.1 app in Singapore (reported by HootSuite 2018). More than 1 billion people around the world use WhatsApp to stay in touch with friends, family, colleagues and business partners anytime and anywhere. It is free and the interface is simple. It seems perfect, can it be better?
To seek for the opportunities of enhancement, I break the discovery into 2 parts:
EXPLORE STAGE
Discovery 1 — Market research
To understand the user’s messaging trend. I had compared the top 4 messaging apps that are widely used in Singapore vs WhatsApp.
For all types of users – friends, family, work, business. The feature is quite similar to WhatsApps. Getting more popular among interest groups as it can hold up to 200,000 members. Catching the heart of the young generation with its animated stickers.
Discovery 2 — Usability testing
The testing objective is to explore users’ behaviour on WhatsApp on existing functions and seek improvement opportunities towards efficiency and functionality. The target participants are WhatsApp users who use it in day-to-day life.
(Left) Summary of synthesis affinity map on similarities:
There are TOP 3 similarities:
1) Camera feature at the Home bottom navigation bar where most users are unaware.
2) Complicated navigation to exit group chat & delete chat progress
3) Users use starred messages to bookmark reminders & appointments but tend to forget. Hence they use a personal reminder.
DEFINE
WhatsApp has the advantage from the competitor research as it is the MOST ADOPT messaging tool among the Singapore market due to peer influence. To retain the user and increase the adoption rate, I focused on enhancing the app’s features.
"WhatsApp users need efficient features to increase productivity over chat."
We believe that through reducing the number of steps taken to complete the task and redesign the main navigation menu, users will be able to take a better control over their schedule and reduce the amount of time on declutter their apps.
Who are these user?
Design thinking
• Introduce appointment & reminder feature in chat
In this appointment feature, it has the capabilities:
• To remind the sender about the appointment based on the timer they set via in-app message.
• To remind the attendees about the appointment based on the timer sender set via in-app message.
• Attendees has the flexibility choose to add their Google / IOS / Outlook calendar.
• Have a “Schedule” section to track their appointment that creates within WhatsApp group with multiple parties. Track all in one tab.
• Create a seamless flow to delete chat
Reduce steps / tap in delete chat flow
• Replace bottom navigation bar
Replace the camera feature at the bottom navigation bar with “Schedule.”
Iterations
NEW: Introduce appointment & reminder feature in chat
NEW: Reducing steps is delete chat
NEW: Replace the camera feature with others
Final design approach
