WhatsApp is a common day to day messaging app everyone uses to communicate to their friends, family, colleagues, customers ,community and groups. The WhatsApp Status feature is one important feature they introduced in early 2017, this feature has been a game changer in the experience of it’s users, business and personal wise, they get to post business related contents, entertaining contents and it has been a source of revenue also to some users in terms influencing. It creates great connection amongst users.
Overtime, we have seen some complaints about the WhatsApp status and some downsides which is explained in the Challenge section bellow. I collaborated with a designer Karen Cummings in working on some of these needs. We picked the ones personal to us to work on and called it Status “Comments feature” and “Mentioning Feature”
Problem 1
As a WhatsApp user like everyone else. when I make a post on my whatsApp status and i get to hear other peoples opinions through replies to my DM and i also want to share them. i have to take multiple screenshots of different chats and crop the screenshot image in order to hide my contact info and then post. This will mostly leave my status chain looking so long like a waist bead, and also takes up storage in my phone due to the multiple screenshots.
Example of a user having a messy screenshot while trying to post a status, and hiding her contacts info
Problem 2
Sometimes people are not aware when other contacts says something about them on their status and they might not get to see it till the status time elapses. for example, when we wish some people happy birthday, most people don’t get to know when their friends wishes them on their status.
We were very passionate about this problem because we ourselves have had our fair share of it. We also knew at the start that we shouldn’t tamper with the existing UI so as not to make users start re-learning or getting to adjust to use the app.
So it was important we try as much as possible to make our new design implementation very familiar with the users.
Creating a seamless experience for whatsApp users to easily show a particular status reply on their status reply section, where other contacts can view them. Also not exposing private info about my contacts like their names or pictures.
Allowing users to Mention contacts on their status so as to notify them when they are being mentioned. We also limited the tag option to maximum of 3 contacts on each post because we know don’t want people to abuse this feature.
The main goal is to create a unique experience for users trying to share their status replies to their status and allow users to mention contacts.