Timeline

4 days

Team

Solo project

Deliverables

High-fi prototype of mobile app, and presentation deck

Summary

For this project at the Ironhack UX/UI Design bootcamp I created a poll feature for WhatsApp group chat. The mission was to research if a poll feature was useful for WhatsApp users. How to integrate the new feature into the app. And how to make the new design native to WhatsApp using the design principles as a guideline.

Role

Since this was a solo project, I was responsible for the end to end product.

01 introduction

The brief

In week three of the Ironhack UX/UI Design bootcamp we had to work individually. The brief stated:

Analyze an already existing and highly adopted app and incorporate a new feature into the existing product.

‍We all had to come up with a possible new feature for a popular app. Excited about our ideas we gave some good options, ready to work on them. But low and behold, all the ideas were mixed up and given to other people. My task was to add a poll feature to the WhatsApp group chat.

02 empathize

Getting to know the user

Starting with a short survey of 12 questions with 14 responses, I wanted to know a little bit more about the group chat aspect of WhatsApp. How many groups do users participate in? How many people are in those groups? And what is the relation to the people in those group chats? Below are some interesting outcomes.

Work related

...groups have the most people on average actively participating, followed by interest/hobby groups

9 people

...would use the poll feature to set up a date for an event or activity

Quantitative research

As you can see above work related groups have the most people participating in it, but the participants have more different group chats related to friend groups. Half of the participants say they would often need to collect votes on a subject matter and would use a poll feature to set up a date for an event or activity.

Qualitative research

With the one-on-one interviews I choose to focus on arranging an event to give it more context, since this was mentioned a couple of times in the user survey. It resulted in a couple of interesting pains and gains.

Pains

Collecting everyone’s availability for an event is an overwhelming task. Not knowing where to begin, not having enough time to ask everyone and forgetting someone to ask where the biggest pains.

Gains

Having everyone included in setting a date and arranging the date quickly to have more time for other things are the biggest gains.

How might we...

With the information from the research I created two ‘How Might We’ statements to get a better picture on how this app can approve the user’s life.

How might we make it quicker and less overwhelming for a user to collect votes?

“I have so much to arrange when planning an event, where do I begin?”

How might we guarantee that no one is left out from voting on a subject matter?

"I worry sometimes that I forget to ask someone their preferences"

03 competitor analysis

The Client

According to www.backlinko.com WhatsApp has over 2 billion active users around the world and is ranked as the most used messenger app in the world. It started out as an alternative for sms and is now an all round media sharing communication platform. Their mission is to help people communicate around the world without any hinderance or barrier.

Competitor feature analysis

I wanted to do more in depth research to see how a poll feature on other platforms were used. What kind of functionalities did they offer in the poll feature? Where is it placed on the platform? What are the wins and loses of how they integrated it?

I compared some available options to see which where commonly used in poll features in other apps and which where interesting but not quite necessary.

Feature analysis

Market (feature) position

Market position

The market feature analysis shows where I want the feature to be placed in between other well known apps with an integrated poll feature.

On the vertical axes showing how accessible the app is. I've noticed that some are harder to apply or to participate in on certain apps than others. Because we want to make collecting votes as quick as possible, an easy and recognizable access is of importance.

On the horizontal axes the amount of options available for the poll feature, like amount of options to a question, the ability to vote anonymously and so on. WhatsApp has stated in their design principles that it will remain simple and quick responsiveness. Therefore it is important to keep the feature simple with only the necessary options.

Visual analysis

Collecting visual information on the competitors made me better understand how other apps integrated a poll feature. The designs are all very much aligned with their native app design, with a few details showing similarities with other platforms. Especially in how they show the statistics of the results.

04 define

Identifying user's problems

After conducting the research, I used the affinity map and empathy map to get a better understanding of how a poll feature could help the user. Starting with creating a user persona, named Mark.

User persona

Mark is a 29 year old single male from the Netherlands who works at an insurance company. He is interested in hanging out with friends or you can find him on the couch reading non-fictional literature about the latest trends in business. But he is ambitious and wants to get more responsibility at work. Therefore he offered to arrange the yearly work event to show his dedication to the company he works for and that he can be responsible enough to manage large groups. Besides that he also wants his coworkers to have a great time.

50%

25–34 years

57%

Male

64%

Dutch

User journey

The first challenge Mark is facing is setting a date. How will he pick a date that everyone is available? How will he have time to ask everyone’s availability? What if I forget to ask someone? During the process of searching for a solution to help Mark arrange a date, this is where the WhatsApp poll feature could benefit him. It leaves him with more time to organize the rest of the event and he doesn’t need to be worried if he might have left someone out.

05 the challenge

Final brief

I've collected all the findings from my research and created a problem and hypothesis statement.

Problem statement

I have observed that voting on a subject matter for large groups can be a time consuming and overwhelming annoyance. How might we create a simple feature to help the user collect votes quickly on a subject matter, that they can send to any group they want to include?

Hypothesis statement

I believe that by creating a poll feature on WhatsApp that is easy and quickly accessible and only has the necessary options to collect votes, will improve the time on collecting votes on a subject matter dramatically.

06 Information architecture

Mapping the structure
of the app

I created a user flow in the information architecture process, since it was necessary to map out how the feature would integrate into the app.

User flow

By creating a happy path I wanted to get a better view of how the user moves from opening WhatsApp to sending out a poll in the group chat. Especially where I would integrate the feature into the process. Starting with placing the feature under send media, which I have tested later on in the process.

07 ideation

Searching for ideas

With the design principles in mind I started brainstorming. Using the Moscow Method to separate the ideas into must have’s and won’t have’s.

Three things I found to be a necessity in order to find a solution to the problem statement.
1. Poll question with a max. of 5 possible options.
2. The poll is nested in a chat box
3. The results of the poll have to show up immediately
4. Multiple choice option

With the customer job and the happy path I quickly sketched out the user flow of the new poll feature. Starting from the chat overview screen to the poll being added in the chat and voted on.

Mid-fidelity

Here you see the mid-fidelity prototype. The top three screens are to find the poll feature. The bottom three screens are to fill in the information of the poll, how it will look like when added and finally the results of the poll when voted on.

Usability test

For testing the mid-fi I used Useberry to see how well the user could find the poll feature and if filling in the settings and voting on the poll felt intuitive or needed some adjustments. I set up three tasks to be completed.

Task 1: Open the group chat and find the poll feature
Task 2: Fill in the poll settings
Task 3: Vote on the poll themselves

Good

Every participant could find the poll without any misclicks and on average would spend a minute to complete the tasks

Bad

Some users had trouble finding the 'submit' button on the active poll in the chat. This could be improved in the high-fi phase.

08 styleguide

Styleguide

For this project I already had brand guidelines to work with. I combined the information I could find and made a guide for my own to help me while designing the new poll feature. It was mission was to design the feature as close as possible to the design esthetics of WhatsApp.

Principles

WhatsApp doesn’t clearly state their design principles on their website, but I found an interesting article from Charlie Deets on Medium. He worked for Facebook and for WhatsApp. In his article he mentioned a couple of company values of WhatsApp. The design should be lightweight and simple. The feature should be self explanatory and the actions and animations should respond quickly. The design also should feel native to the device of the user.

09 solution

High fidelity prototype

The final result of the poll feature in WhatsApp group chat.
The poll can be found under the 'add media' button in the group chat. The user can add a question and fill in a maximum of 5 options and is able to opt in for multiple choice votes. When send it displays in the group chat like a chatbox. Other people in the group chat can then select the option they prefer and see immediate results of the votes, making it easier for quick decision making.

10 Conclusion

Final thoughts

Here are my final thoughts about possible next steps and the key learnings from the project.

Next steps

Testing the feature with developers to see if the feature aligns with the design principles of WhatsApp. Mainly if the feature is lightweight and is quick responsive. If so, new extra’s for the feature could be integrated upon further research. I would also like to explore the possibility of pinning a poll on top of the page or in the group’s bio. So every user in the group chat is able to find and vote on the poll easily.

Key learnings

This was my first individual UX design project. By doing every step yourself you learn a lot about the whole process. Designing according to the design principles of an app and setting up a design system were the key learnings this week. I had a little trouble with usability testing with the high-fi due to technical difficulties. This would have potentially given me ideas to iterate on and to learn how to go back to your design and rethink a new solution. Next time I also want to ask more questions during usability testing to get more insights about the process.

A poll feature for WhatsApp group chat