WhatsApp Remind Feature — a UX case study

I want you to have a look at these conversations:

Have you had similar conversations on WhatsApp?

What’s the common trend in these conversations?

In each scenario, the recipient is given the task to remember events and in some case remind the sender back in a certain period of time. Personally, I keep forgetting such things said to me on WhatsApp(and I imagine, many people do).

This led me to think of adding a new feature called “Remind” in WhatsApp. A feature which can allow us to convert any message into an event reminder in the app itself. This would allow users to make a reminder of any message in the chat.

But before jumping in the design, let us have a look at WhatsApp’s design philosophy and how they go about adding features in the app.

Background 😬

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app on the planet right now. People have their own reasons to love WhatsApp, but as a designer, I was most fascinated by their design philosophy.

You might wonder, what’s so great in the design. It’s not flashy, and boring most of the time. But that’s where the success lies for the design. The app is so intuitive that it feels boring. The design is easy to use, simple enough that WhatsApp doesn’t have to educate users about any new feature that they introduce. In the blog posted by Charlie Deets(product designer at WhatsApp at the time), he specifically mentioned WhatsApp’s design philosophy:

“If a feature needs explanation, it’s not ready.” 👏

This line got me excited about WhatsApp’s design. And since I was working on a Remind feature in WhatsApp, I thought, let me design it the way the WhatsApp design team would do. So, I researched about their philosophy, the things they put attention to it, the subtle design choices they make and the design principles they religiously follow, and used my design senses to build a comprehensive flow for the Remind feature.

Problem Statement

Design a new Remind feature in WhatsApp and integrate it with the current design of WhatsApp… all this while having some fun 😜.

Design Principles

I have followed the design principles that are used in the WhatsApp design team(read more in the blog by Charlie Deets):

• The interface should feel native to the device(in our case, Android)
• Simple Interface with quick animations and user actions
• Any new feature addition should provide obvious utility that it requires very little introduction.

Feature Design

Let’s take a look at this conversation:

In this, Tony is asking our user to bring the stormbreaker to the falafal place. We want our user to make this message into a reminder so that he gets reminded on a specific time before the party to take the stormbreaker with him.

For the remaining part of the case study, we would take this conversation as our basis.

The flow

The flow starts with selecting the message:

The Remind icon appears on the top bar:

Brief Backstory 😒

Before reaching to this final design, I researched about the different ways people interact with a message:

Ways in which a user interacts with a message

The interactions were either long press to react on messages or auto detect the dates and make it clickable. All of them were good options but none of them felt native to the WhatsApp experience. They had their limitations as auto detection can detect date and time(number based) in messages, but doesn’t give the users the freedom to convert any message in a reminder. And since, WhatsApp is an encrypted platform, data interpretation and keyword searching is also not feasible.

Therefore I decided to keep the interface same and add a new icon in the top bar, pushing the less used feature(starred message) inside the vertical ellipsis, thus keeping up with the design principles.

Mark as Important(starred messages) gets pushed inside the vertical ellipsis

Back to the flow 😅…

Upon selecting the Remind icon, a new event screen opens up. It has 3 sections, the Reminder text(copied from the selected message), Event time and Date & Repeat Event options.

Upon selecting the Remind Icon, the New Event screen opens up

Once the Event text is copied from the message, the user can either modify it to a reminder like message, or keep the same text as the reminder.

The original message modified to a more reminder like message.

Now, changing the date and time

Now, upon saving, the alert becomes a reminder and gets saved. But if you are introducing a reminder list, you need a screen to showcase it all.

This is how the current home-screen looks like 😐:

Current Homescreen

And this is how it will look after the introduction of a reminder list 😎:

Homescreen with the addition of a new “Event” list

“Event” feature with the list of reminders

And Voila, the WhatsApp reminder is here 😌:

NOTE 😶

This was a hypothetical fun project. So the feature introduction might not align with the business requirements and the product directions of WhatsApp as a company. But if ever WhatsApp wants to release this sort of feature(why would they?), they can take some cue from here 😉.

Spell Correction- Falafel, not F̵a̵l̵a̵f̵a̵l̵ 😓.

References

• One Year Designing at WhatsApp- Charlie Deets
• Why Whatsapp’s design makes it the best instant messenger- Chris Lee
• Image Credits: Google Images