Case study: Message pinning in WhatsApp

When we have around 200–400 unread messages to read in a single chat, important messages are often left ignored or unnoticed. Also searching or navigating for important messages in a long conversation is a frustrating and tedious task.

If you ever had a similar problem, you probably will like my idea!

Overview

During the pandemic of 2020, I decided to research and work on a new feature of pinning messages on WhatsApp, enabling users to pin their message. This is an individual project done, intending to practice and develop myself as a professional in the UX/UI world.

Research

WhatsApp being a global application with around 1 billion users, I just wanted to confirm the user types and major audience it supports, and major use cases.

Insights from Web

1. WhatsApp’s social network is unique in several ways relative to other social networks. This application was developed to allow users to privately and freely send messages to each other through their smartphones.
2. The majority of users lie between the age of 18–25 years and the other major age group is 26–35 years.
3. WhatsApp has provided a free alternative to SMS (Short Message Services) which is often 3 still a metered (pay per use) service. Not only is WhatsApp often more cost-effective than SMS, but it facilitates large group conversations, something that is difficult through SMS, if not impossible.

User Interviews

As the majority of our users are from 18–25 years and 26–35 years, I decided to interview a few people to get a better insight into the scenarios in which message pinning might be used.

I interviewed 6 students from my college, 2 of my school friends ( age group 18–22 years), 4 relatives ( age group 26–35 years), and my aunt ( 36 age, Teacher by profession, used WhatsApp extensively during the corona pandemic).

Before taking the Interview, I noted the things I need to know and things I need to verify.

• What do people prefer on WhatsApp professional or personal work on WhatsApp?
• What are the user’s incentives to pin messages on WhatsApp?
• Are users familiar with the pinning feature on any other medium?
• What kind of messages people might pin in a conversation?

Interviews varied for every person, there were some basic questions same for everyone.

Interview Questions:

1. Which app did they use the most for messaging daily?
2. For what purpose you use WhatsApp, professional(work) or personal?
3. How Corona pandemic has affected their WhatsApp usage?
4. How much do you rely on WhatsApp for important announcements and messages?
5. Have you ever used the pinning feature elsewhere?
6. What kind of messages would you pin?

Insights Gained

• People prefer WhatsApp for personal use rather than professional. It was assumed that users who shifted from SMS to WhatsApp might be using WhatsApp for professional purposes but still, interviews suggest that they prefer WhatsApp mostly for personal usage and check office work only when required. Moreover, as there are specialized applications like slack and flock for professional work. Start-ups also prefer them over WhatsApp.
• In the Covid pandemic Schools and Colleges, students were mainly dependent on WhatsApp for their academics. Many professional businesses also started using WhatsApp in the pandemic for their daily work and faster communication with the employees.
• Only a few people rely on WhatsApp for professional or important messages and announcements and in general prefer Gmail for this purpose.
• Rarely anyone has used the pinning feature anywhere.
• Most of them will pin the important messages or information in groups having a good number of people. Professionals will pin the weekly/daily tasks, deadlines, and other formal announcements. In school groups, teachers will pin the messages related to submission dates, changed schedules, and home works. College students have a maximum number of informal and formal WhatsApp groups and they would have a variety of messages that can be pinned.

Other platforms providing pinning.

· Slack

· Telegram

User Personas

Pain Point

WhatsApp users often leave important messages unnoticed in an unread long conversation with many messages and find it hard to navigate these messages even after reading the whole conversation.

The Solution

Designing a pinning feature in WhatsApp allowing users to pin their messages.

Wireframes

These are the initial sketches that I prepared before designing high-fidelity interfaces. Paper and pen is a convenient way to put your ideas together and analyze different solutions.

Key Product Decisions

• The pinning feature is accessible in the taskbar, which appears when a message is long pressed.
• Pinned messages will be shown on top of the chat screen rather than on a new screen. For good accessibility.
• Clicking on the pinned message will take you to that point of conversation where it was typed, solving the problem of navigating the message.
• Showing a maximum of two pinned messages with a drop-down button to access all the pinned messages on top of the chat screen

Pinning

Pinning a message is very easy, long-press the message to be pinned and the pinning option will come in the action bar along with other options, press it and your message will be pinned at the top of the chat screen. Once pinned the typed message will turn yellow in color for good visual clarity.

Unpinning

To unpin a message click on the pinned message it will take you the originally typed message, long press it and use unpin option in the taskbar. The message will be unpinned and will be removed from the top of the chat screen while the typed message turns back to the original color.

Pinned Messages

At max 2 pinned messages will be shown at the top of the chat screen if there are more than 2 messages only the recent one will be shown with a drop-down button. Using the drop-down option all pinned messages can be seen on the same chat screen.

To show all the pinned messages at once on the chat screen was not feasible without the drop-down button, as there will be no space left to display other messages and will also leave no space if someone opens the keyboard.

All the pinned messages will retract to their original position if the users click on the show less button or open their keyboard.

Pinning History

In the three dots menu present at the rightmost corner, the user will find an option of pinning history. Pinning history will contain all the once pinned messages, arranged in order of date and time. If the messages once pinned were deleted they will not be shown here.

Further Scope

I worked on the main flow, here are a few more things that can be implemented.

1. All the assumptions made can be tested and iterated accordingly.
2. To increase the response on pinned messages and to get better attention to these pinned messages, nudges or notifications can be used.
3. Edit option available after long-pressing the pinned messages on top of the chat screen (only for the user who has pinned the message).

That’s all Folks! Thanks for scrolling Click the clap button if you enjoyed reading and learned something from it.

If you have a project that we can work on, or just wanna talk about, inbox me: tanishk22star@gmail.com