Case study: Social scheduling feature in WhatsApp
Scheduling events or catch-ups with contacts can be challenging due to the difficulties in arranging a time and venue that suits everyone. As life becomes increasingly busy and social circles shrink, how can social apps facilitate the maintenance of old friendships and the establishment of new ones more effectively? This need has not yet been fully met in major messaging apps. Starting with my pain points, this project explores a new feature in WhatsApp and WeChat to unlock the scheduling potential.
Skills
User Research
UX/UI
Tools
Adobe XD
Side project
Collaborated with Valentina Li
Phase 1 - Discovery research: Understand unmet user needs and missing opportunities
Our survey indicates that 75% of respondents schedule events or catch-ups through messaging apps, and more than half of them experienced difficulties or inconveniences in the process. The most common issues reported include:
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slow response or getting ignored (66.1%)
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disagreement on time/location/budget (47.2%)
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needing to ask multiple people individually (42.5%)
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difficulty in keeping track of group communication (37.8%)
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uncertainty about whom to invite (21.3%)
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forgetting plans or experiencing no-show on the day (15.7%)
In-person interviews with some participants further revealed underlying intrinsic needs that remain unmet, such as:
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desire to know who else will attend before making a decision
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tendency to reject invitations if disliked individuals will be present
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unwillingness to deal with flakey people
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lack of ideas about interesting activities or events available
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feeling embarrassed sending or accepting invitations to/from 'weak-tie' friends
Define the problems
People may be shy and passive, so finding ways to reduce the effort for everyone to invite and attend, while also avoiding discomfort, is a major problem to be addressed.
Sometimes people want to socialize but lack ideas about what to do, so a platform that suggests fun activities based on personal interests is in demand.
Everyone has previously experienced difficulties when arranging events due to differing preferences on time, venue, and budget.
Reaching an agreement for a large-group event becomes even more challenging.
Phase 2 - Mapping and gather insights
Set design goals
For shy people and passive socializers, it should be easier to accept or reject others' invitations with reduced social anxiety.
For active socializers, it should provide more opportunities to socialize, and more feeds of interesting events.
For event organizers, it should lower the difficulty in reaching an agreement on time/location/budget with all attendees.
Increased access
Encourage people to browse and attend more interesting events posted by their contacts
Reduced effort
Easy decisions
Lower the effort and awkwardness to schedule/join/reject plans
Eliminate ambiguous replies to invitations and flakey behaviors
Streamline the decision-making process within groups
Privacy
choose who can see your activity
Efficiency
easy to organize and avoid flakey people
Transparency
see all attendees before joining
Autonomous
poll available for time/venue decisions
Phase 3 - Ideation driven by research insights
Wireframing
Compact vs Split screens
Flowchart
Phase 4 - Refine the design based on user testing feedbacks
We conducted moderated user testing with hi-fi prototypes in-person and asked 'why' questions while participants completed three tasks: browsing and finding an event to join, accepting/declining an invitation, and creating an event page.
A key takeaway was that most participants preferred to control the level of privacy. Therefore, we added a touchpoint for selecting 'being visible to' with multiple options such as 'public', 'the selected group', or 'the selected people'.
Many users expressed the opinion that the scheduling feature would be particularly valuable in the context of arranging social activities with larger groups (more than 5 people).
