Concept Project: Introducing polls feature on WhatsApp
This is a UI/UX case study describing the introduction of polls feature to the WhatsApp Android Application.
Driving factor for taking up the project
Last month I was given the simple task of organising a meeting within a group of 8 people. All I had to do was setup a meeting time and date, and share the Zoom link then, making sure that everybody turns up.
Little did I know that it’ll take me 3 hours negotiating the time, date, the agenda and the platform for hosting the meeting. When I dropped the message on the WhatsApp group to ask for suitable time, each of the member came up with their own excuses and a different time.
Even when four of us settled on one, 15 minutes later, another came storming in and we had to repeat the process again of setting up the time. When everything was done, there were like 450+ messages piled up and one of the members who checked the group later, scrolled through the messages half-attentively as the number was too daunting and he misunderstood the timing and nearly missed the meeting.
Relatable much?
Well, with the pandemic ongoing, it’s indispensable that we use our phone and laptops for the major part of the day and all our work is shifted virtually. This calls for some redesign or addition of features to the most popular apps for easing up our daily digital activities. Here is one such attempt of drafting the polls feature to WhatsApp, out of enthusiasm to solve design problems around me with a human-centered approach.
Design Process:
I have followed the famous Double Diamond Design model as the basic underlying principle driving this project. Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver.
I have used Adobe Illustrator, Figma and Miro as Design Tools for the project.
Problem Space:
WhatsApp has a huge dependence by people all around the globe, for virtual communication. Any project team, classroom or some friends doing birthday planning, directly connects to the birth of a new WhatsApp Group. However, people are tired of being in endless groups and have more inactive groups than the active ones. This defeats the purpose of the group and people can’t coordinate with each other in an organised manner, being uninformed about the decisions or the activity of the group.
Problem Statement:
How might we help the group members in a WhatsApp Community to record their inputs and viewpoints in a fair and constructive way, without wasting time and the discussions which drag relentlessly?
Problem Explained:
It has been reported that 1.5 billion users in 180 countries makes WhatsApp the most-popular messaging app in the world — 0.2 billion more than stablemate Facebook Messenger.
Big numbers!
- There are as many as one billion daily active WhatsApp users.
- India is the biggest WhatsApp market in the world, with 200 million users (it’s estimated in some quarters that this has increased to 300 million).
This highlights the dependency of people on WhatsApp.
- Facebook Messenger introduced polls in 2016 but then they were removed as a part of Facebook’s ‘Lightspeed’ revamp of the Messenger app, which sought to streamline its operations and de-clutter presentation.
- They weren’t gone for long, but their absence prompted a significant enough backlash that Facebook announced that polls for Messenger are once again back in play within your chat streams.
This instance definitely prompts us to bring the concept of polls to WhatsApp too. Also, the popular usage of group chats on WhatsApp can easily be supported by the fact that WhatsApp extended the limit of group calls to 8 from what was earlier 4.
Goal
- The driving motive is to save the time of group members and make it easy to come on a conclusion.
- This will not just ensure equal value to everyone’s say but also will ensure that everyone stays in loop with the activity and decisions of the group.
User Research
I focused on qualitative research rather than quantitative since the statistics were good enough to point out the extensive use of WhatsApp. I talked to a few people at length about how can the experience of group chats be improved on WhatsApp and here are some of the responses I received. Following are some excerpts from the conversations I had with the users.
I even checked in LinkedIn Communities to know what people think about the addition of this feature in the WhatsApp UI. I found out that people are looking out for polls in group chats.
The inputs can be summed up as:
- People use group chats extensively to share information and discuss stuff collectively. It leads to discussion and deliberation, sometimes healthy, sometimes plainly futile.
- Users complained about a lot of messages being collected in their absence and they tend to skip it , unknowingly missing out on important information shared during that period.
- People suggested features like polls and question stickers apart from pinning messages or using color highlights to indicate importance of a text.
- Some creative ideas like sorting media files sent on the basis of the user who sent it or adding threads to messages (similar to Slack) also came up.
Though all of these suggestions were pretty interesting and inviting to work on, but I restricted myself to work on one at a time.
So, here I’ll be describing all about including the Polls feature on WhatsApp by incorporating the other ideas in this single feature only. They can be extended further to the entire user experience of group chats and I may work later on it. But for efficient and fast results, I chose to work on one feature at a time, this time being Polls.
User Personas
The findings of the research can be culminated by classifying the average users of this feature indicating their needs and frustrations with the current interface. I could sum and categorise it as these four average users of the feature.
The users are diverse just like that of WhatsApp, though their needs and frustrations vary. This increases the stress of this single feature of polls to cater to all kinds of users.
Further, to stay focused and build the feature diligently, I divided these users profiles as Primary and Secondary Personas. The primary one being Aman Pandey, the student and Ayush Saini, the manager. These two are complimenting personas since one will be participating in the polls, and the other one will be conducting, therefore giving me an insight of both the ends.
The secondary personas of Nikita Singh, a housewife and Rahul Singh, an employee at a firm are just evolved versions of Aman Pandey and have more intricate needs, similar to his, extending on to the use cases of the feature.
Primary Personas Story Boarding
The entire research and detailed study of user scenario can be synthesized through these insights:
Ideating on the sub-features
Keeping the entire process in mind , the findings from the field research and studying competitors like ‘Polly’ on Teams and polls on Messenger, I came up with the following set of sub-features to be incorporated in the design of the polls main feature:
You can check out the manifestation of these features further in the wireframes.
Navigation of the feature
This is some basic brainstorming done while coming up with the flow of the feature and setting up the navigation.
There were four spots considered to put the icon of adding polls on the WhatsApp interface. After analyzing the pros and cons, I settled on going with the option D presented above.
Flow of the polls feature
The flow can be summarized as follows:
High Fidelity Wireframes
All the UX part can now be put into action and the following wireframes show the details and the implementation of this feature.
For the notifications whenever anyone responds to the poll, I thought that we could have it similar to the UI when someone leaves a group. Sending notifications every time someone responds could be motivating to vote for some or nagging for others. It is honestly a personal choice but going by what I learnt from the research, I decided to switch off these notifications by default. If one wishes to receive them, they can easily switch on in the settings.
These are all the major screens and the concepts involved to implement this feature.
Validation and Testing
I believe that carrying out usability testing on the feature will be good enough to gauge its utility and impact on users. After collection of the data and performing various situation tests, we can iterate further and improve the user flow to enhance the user’s experience for group chats.
Learning and takeaways
Design is an iterative process. WhatsApp is extremely popular for messaging et al, but still there’s always room for making the user’s experience better. Whatsapp has a huge user base and thus adding a new feature means different expectations and relevance to different set of users.
Through this project, I learnt the nitty-gritty details to blend a new feature in an already existing app in a way that it feels like it was there since eternity. I realised the importance of user research and its centrality in the entire process.
Dylan Wilbanks said , “You can do design without research. You can also drive blindfolded. But both have expensive consequences and usually end in being upside down in a ditch.”
Thanks for reading! Happy Designing :))
