MESSENGER CASE STUDY

Overview

CONTEXT

My junior year spring semester I was enrolled in Digital Product Design course and had the opportunity to carry out this case study. I had the opportunity of carrying out an end- to- end design process that involved identifying the people problem and designing for it.

SUMMARY

With the amount of texts and emails we receive as well as the different number of social media accounts we have, it is difficult to effectively maintain conversation flow and to have timely responses. This is specifically difficult for college students to increased number of social media accounts, responsibilities as well as project based classes.

THE SOLUTION

Came up with a ‘specific reply feature’ that allows users to respond directly to the message that they want to respond to.

TIMELINE

8 weeks.

MY ROLE

User Research, Product Thinking, Interaction Design, Visual Design

Research

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM SPACE

Many people use messenger to keep in touch with their friends as well as to make group arrangements. They are busy and receive many messages and don’t instantly reply to them. By the time they reply the messages, conversation flow is broken.

USER RESEARCH

I set to understand the pain points in the messaging experience for college students with my main hypothesis being that the app did not align with college students' lifestyles.

My main goals for this research were:

· Understand what people struggle to achieve while replying messages on messenger

· Understand features that people would like messenger to have so as to better their experience

· Understand why people prefer other messaging apps to messenger

. Understand availability management afforded by messenger

RESEARCH INSIGHTS

I analyzed the user responses into affinity diagrams, personas and user journey maps.

People Problem at Hand

When I am busy I want to be able to reply to my messages later and at my own will so that I can give the responses the attention they deserve but I can’t do this well because:

1. My friends simultaneously send too many messages

2. Group chats are constantly sending new messages

3. Replying to messages later breaks the conversation flow

4. It is hard to keep track of conversations if there are too many messages

Personas and Storyboard

Affinity Diagram

Brainstorming and Ideation

Figuring out what to implement

For the ideation sprint, I had a brainstorming session with three other individuals. The main goal of this process was to turn challenges of the users into opportunity.

Round #1: With the people problem at hand, we came up with ‘How might wes’ scenarios.

Round #2: We identified three opportunities:

1. How might we incentivize people to reply their texts faster?

2. How might we enable people to know where they are in a conversation and what they are talking about?

3. How might we be able to know what is to be replied when?

Round 3: Coming up with solution spaces and design ideas on the solution spaces

SOLUTION SPACE

After identifying the main opportunities to explore, I came up with numerous ideas which fulfilled on the opportunities identified.

Design Phase

MEDIUM FIDELITY SKETCHES - 3 IDEAS

Since messenger was a well known app to the users, I began sketching the potential solutions in medium fidelity.

With the three design features, I carried out Guerrilla protocol testing and from the collected data analyzed the value all the above features offered to users’ experience and settled for the ‘specific message reply feature’.

Using Guerrilla Testing technique, I was trying to understand which of the solutions best meet the people problem identified. The user testing was essential in deciding what feature to implement. Some of the feedback include:

Final Solution

Specific Message Reply Feature

In this phase, I reevaluated whether the chosen feature still solves the people problem and meets the business goals of Messenger. The end goal of this phase was to determine whether or not the specific message reply feature would incentivize users to reply to messages and at the same time ensure conversation flow.

Feature Requirement

The specific message reply feature allows users to reply to a particular message within a conversation, either individual or group chat.

Core Interaction

From the people problem, there are four main core interactions:

1. Selecting the specific message to reply to

2. Location of the reply option

3. Presenting the message that the user is replying to the user

4. Presenting the replied message to the user

Long pressing the specific text we were trying to reply to made the most sense as it the solution that least interfered with the already present and normal flow of Messenger.

EXPLORATION OF INTERACTION FLOWS USING MEDIUM FIDELITIES

Location of the reply option

Main interaction in the middle point of the design solution is locating the reply option and typing out a response.
The two options above show different positions of the reply option

Showcase of the message that the user is replying to

Presentation of the reply

FINAL INTERACTION FLOW

Final Design

Conclusion

OUTCOMES

People receive many messages, texts and emails via different avenues and need to reply to most of them. With this in mind, all messaging apps aim to make the user’s experience as easy as possible and provide features that help the conversations flow well. For example Instagram, iMessage and Messenger as well allow the user to be able to react to a specific message and WhatsApp ,Messenger use the ‘@’ feature in group chats to enable reference to a particular group member . However, none of these features enable the user to reply to a specific message, a feature which would make the user experience really convenient by enabling them to keep track of their conversation and offer a direct response to a specific message.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS AND REFLECTION

Main takeaways from this project were:

1. In as much as new features are great for the user, maintaining consistency of the app's environment is important.

2. Most features already present most likely enhance the business goals, therefore, getting rid of them affect the business. Therefore, careful deliberation and iteration is required before taking radical design decision.