WhatsApp is a communication tool, well known for it's ability to connect families and friends across borders. Due to its ease of use and international accessibility, it is an application people often use for both work and personal use. During a two-week sprint, my team and I redesigned the application to highlight these two distinguishable usable spaces within the app.
WhatsApp is an app on which people are able to text, voice and video calling. WhatsApp, ultimately, "desires to let people communicate anywhere in the world without barriers" and its interface reflects this.
However, WhatsApp's mission results in users having various conversations on the platform with both personal and work contacts. My team and I, thus, decided to create features that would improve the way the app can connect people around the world in a more efficient and organized manner.
Our preliminary research consisted of user surveys, competitive analysis and user interviews. Interview and survey questions were discussed and finalized collaboratively within the team.
We were able to determine what the common thread between all competitors. We also highlighted the gaps in the market and how Whatsapp could fill them.
Out of 41 respondents, 51.6% said they use the WhatsApp both on the web and the phone
Using the quantitative data we acquired, we were able to create interview questions that addressed the general themes and patterns that we found.
I often send the wrong message
to the wrong group chat in WhatsApp because I have so many on the platform
Used the qualitative data constructed our user personas and their pain points. These pain points led to some opportunities for improvement within the app.
Now that we were familiar with our users and what role WhatsApp played in their lives, we needed to identify the roadblocks and struggles our users faced during their daily use. According to our research, we identified two primary problems areas:
Users are unable to organize
their many conversations
within the platform
People have a mix of work and personal chats with no way to organize this. Work conversations would often interrupt personal time and vice versa
Other than a profile picture,
there was no way to
distinguish between chats
Often users send a
message into the wrong
chat.
No method for keeping
track of the events
scheduled within a
group-chat
People often miss events
or meetings when they are
scheduled in a Whatsapp
group.
Large group chats
struggled with coming to a
consensus when making
decisions
Often times not all
group members voices
are heard when making
such decisions.
Multiple users were
confused with the new
Facebook Rooms feature
on WhatsApp
Whatsapp is not often
used for collaborating
via video chats for both
business or personal use.
Delving further into the design process we set up a user persona that was inspired by the user interviews, surveys and affinity mapping we had done earlier.
Wendy is a working woman and an avid WhatsApp user. She uses the app to keep in touch with both work and personal contacts. This is because Whatsapp is easy to use and accessible on both phone and web app.
Currently, she is using Whatsapp to lead a product launch at work. She often uses Whatsapp to keep in touch with her team who are all already on the platform.
Wendy has been using WhatsApp to help plan her friend’s wedding because she is able to connect with the bridal party from around the world with ease.
After identifying out key problem areas, we decided to apply them to our primary user's day-to-day life in order to visualize the problem spaces and explore where solutions would need to placed within a user flow
Providing an interface on which users could toggle between their personal and work space.
Taking the work and personal spaces further by providing the ability to mute either spaces as well.
Adding in the ability to make a poll within a group chat for easier consensus during discussions.
Using color to help users distinguish between their different group and personal conversations.
Via a link users can send event invites to other chat members who can then use it to add the event into their personal calendar.
After ideating on the general solutions for our users, the next step was bringing our improvements to life. Each of us ideated on one of the improvements and then reconvened to get feedback and make decisions on the final product.
Individually, the team participated in a crazy eights session, from which a design studio was developed. The team decided to vote for the designs we wanted to further pursue and iterate on. Thus these initial sketches were used to create our final paper prototypes.
The following are the initial sketches that were finalized for further iterations:
Two versions of the initial sketches for our muting feature where selected in our crazy eight’s session. A/B testing was done with the initial paper prototype to determine whether the muting option should be in the settings or within in the toggling work/personal tabs.
Our Polls features was added to the current menu option in WhatsApp. Later iterations of this flow included a “cancel” button to the polls form field, further designing the Polls flow to be similar to the other feature options in the menu including “Photo & Video Library and Documents”.
Initial sketches for the event invite feature consisted of a shared calendar between users in a chat. However, this feature drastically changed over the course of the sprint. Further iterations and user testing indicated that having a shared calendar in each of the chats on the platform would be inefficient. Thus, a shared calendar was not further pursued in our next round of iterations.
We briefly pursued designing a video conferencing feature to WhatsApp web after conversation with our users indicated they often switched to Zoom or Microsoft teams during business meetings. They wished for something within WhatsApp that could allow for these meetings to also happen within the application. However, with the integration of Facebook Rooms to the platform, we collectively decided the addition of another video conferencing feature would be redundant. Moreover, such a feature would not follow WhatsApp’s business model.
These were the final deliverable prototypes developed based on the improvements we identified earlier and sketches we did during iteration.
Wendy often found that her personal chats kept popping up at work and her work conversation interrupted her personal time. With this segregation of work and personal chats, she can now mute either of the two spaces and toggle between the two.
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Using color as a visual cue for each group chat now allows Wendy to make sure she is sending her messages in the right place. Working Wendy no longer makes mistakes in sending the wrong message to the wrong chat.
Polls are now used by Wendy to come to quick decisions in both her work chats and personal conversations. Instead of trying to track each person’s response, members in a group chat can just vote for their preferred choice.
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Wendy is now able to add events to directly into her personal calendar. This process is not longer tedious because it does not require the user to manually input the location, time etc. When sending an event invite into a group chat other members now have the option of adding the event into their own calendars as well.
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Our final improvements to the platform were designed on both web and mobile interfaces. Explore the resulting prototypes by via a guided video walk-through:
During this sprint, for the first time, I was able to experience the UX design process in its entirety within a collaborative work environment. I learnt many things working with my amazing team, each of us coming from different backgrounds allowing for a diverse range of conversation and input. The following were my greatest takeaways from this experience:
This project taught me the importance of communication and learning to take everyone’s thoughts and opinions into consideration. Delegating tasks and coming to finals decisions was something that we had to learn as a team. I enjoyed working with my team’s synergy as each of us practiced maintaining a sense of openness and keeping conversations flowing.
In order to work agilely, creating a precise schedule with deadlines for each team members is necessary. Assigning tasks for each of the members also allows for optimizing our time wisely. During this sprint, by being in constant open communication with my team members, we were able to stay on track and meet all our deadlines.
Working in a larger group during a two week sprint, allowed for the development of user journey for our personas. A user journey allowed us to analyze our user persona’s motivations further and design the ideal user flow keeping their pain points in mind.
Design is an iterative process and as such further steps can be taken to improve our final designs. After doing a brief design critique on the final deliverable, the following are things I would improve on or do next:
The use of color as a visual cue - although effective, may not solve the underlying issue for color blind or visually impaired individuals. Further testing and alternatives need to be taken into consideration to determine what steps can be taken to eradicate this issue for all users.
I would like to iterate on the flow that creates personal vs work contacts for individuals when they begin a new conversation on the platform. Currently, our designs show how to the user flow would look with such a feature already implemented. I would like to investigate what flow would be ideal when adding in a contact and designating them as work or personal. Can they be both? Would this mean there are can be a personal and a work chat for one person?