WhatsApp is the world’s most popular messaging app, with over a billion and a half monthly users. I use it almost every day to keep in touch with teams, friends, and family all over the world. It’s simple and effective. It’s a no-frills, lean, and reliable messaging/calling/video-chatting app.

Yet for all of its utility, WhatsApp does not spark joy, and were it not for the numerous family and social group chats I’ve been added to over the years, I might have long ago followed Marie Kondo’s advice on all that does not spark joy.

WhatsApp is an eyesore. It is messy to find chats and content. In 2019 it still doesn’t have reminders, polls, or even reactions. The way it handles threaded responses is lacking.

Lucky for WhatsApp, this is an opportunity to elevate the user experience. Here are some ideas:

Separate group chats from chats

One on one chats and group chats perform very different functions for users; while one on one chats by their nature are great for intimate conversations, group chats are great for keeping in touch with a larger number of people at once. Whether this means sharing news with family, planning dinner with friends, or coordinating with a team, group chats are a powerful way to address those messaging scenarios.

There’s only space for a handful of chats in the chats list though, and so if you’re in a decent number of active group chats, chances are that they will bubble to the top and take up real estate, pushing individual chats or less active group chats further down and possibly out of view. It would be nice to be able to see a list of group chats separate form a list of one on one chats, and be able to swipe between them the way we currently can between chats and calls. This separation would make for a cleaner UI and a better separation of use cases.

A new screen for group chats would help declutter the main chats screen, where group chats often take the top few spots

Search pops up on scroll up

It would be nice to be able to see the search bar appear as soon as you start scrolling up on the chats page, instead of having to scroll all the way up.

Not having to scroll up to the search bar to search would be nice

Improve Search

Speaking of search, it’s a great opportunity to make the app a whole lot more usable. Currently search only returns contacts or (a select few) messages containing the search term, but more types of search results are possible. What if searching for someone’s name allowed you to see a list of group chats you have in common with them? Or to view their profile? Or to quickly jump into their status update? What if searching for a text also surfaced photos or videos shared in that message?

Slack is a good example of search done well. You can search for people, messages, documents, and more all from one place. Slack surfaces different result types seamlessly in the same view.

Slack’s search is a good model for apps where search results can take a number of different types

Display an animation when someone is typing

Currently when someone is typing you see the little text under their name go from “online” to “typing…”.

Instead, if there was a little bubble that came up at the bottom of the chat with a dynamic typing indicator, it could serve to make WhatsApp seem a little more dynamic and real time. Instagram does a good job of this in its direct messaging service. A dynamic, visually appealing typing indicator draws people into a conversation in real time. It can give pregnant pauses life, inject emotion to a wall of back-and-forth text, and make conversations feel more real.

WhatsApp‘s typing indicator is too subtle to be engaging

Threaded conversations

Currently you can only reply to one message, and it shows up in a way where the original message’s first few lines are appended to the top of your reply bubble. This takes up significant space on a phone screen, and doesn’t show any previous messages that the one you replied to might be a response to. It also doesn’t show anyone else’s responses to that same message either.

This is what replies look like in WhatsApp today

Instead, what might make more sense is to treat messages like Facebook posts. By making an expandable thread, people can see the original message as well as all responses to it, by different people. This way messages that could benefit from multiple responses or prolonged, concentrated discussion can be treated differently without losing their context in a whirlwind of subsequent unrelated messages. Every new reply to that thread should be treated the same way any new message to the group chat is treated today: the new message goes to the bottom of the group chat, dragging the thread it is appended to down with it. We could see the first line or two of the original message and some UI to indicate a collapsed thread, and the latest response would be displayed in full at the bottom.

Microsoft Teams does a good job of threaded conversations in their channels. A similar paradigm could improve WhatsApp’s reply functionality. (Full disclosure: I used to work on Microsoft Teams)

In the context of a group chat, not all messages need to be treated as threads. But sometimes messages merit targeted responses, such as when someone wants to respond to something several messages earlier in the chat, or when they don’t want the context of the discussion to be scattered among several messages. This is especially useful for teams, who may be juggling several different discussions in the same chat, and may want to update those discussions as new information comes in or as developments unfold.

Letting messages become threads allows for a clean, intuitive way to preserve context and allows for that kind of discussion.

GIFs as first party media

WhatsApp supports GIFs, but there’s no easy way to search for the perfect GIF within the app. GIFs are engaging, dynamic, and fun. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a GIF is worth a thousand times the number of frames it contains. Younger demographics especially prefer expressing emotion through images, and making it seamless to carry conversations forward with the power of this visual medium makes WhatsApp that much more enjoyable and expressive.

Microsoft Teams has a GIF selector featured at the same level as the attachment and emoji selectors. The prominent placement makes it hard not to use GIFs, and is an incredibly popular feature and differentiator

Profile pictures next to text bubbles

WhatsApp in recent years has made a push to give users small profile pages, and encourages them to upload a profile picture. Showing this picture above the text bubble instead of displaying the full name would go a long way in making conversations, especially group chats, feel more personable. Facebook Messenger does this, and it makes the UI feel cleaner and friendlier.

Facebook Messenger keeps the focus on the profile pictures, with names written softly above them

Show display names of non-contacts more prominently

If you’re in a group chat with people not in your contact list, WhatsApp shows their number in color, with their display name next to it in gray letters, preceded by a tilda. The fact that the phone number features prominently in color while the name is grayed out and to the side makes messages from non-contacts seem more impersonal, especially as compared to messages from contacts. Instead, WhatsApp should reverse this by showing the display name in color with the number in gray next to it.

This Arabic screenshot shows the point well; messages from non-contacts seem more impersonal because the display name is grayed out and the focus is given to the phone number

Reactions

Enough said. Reactions are pretty standard fare in messaging apps now. It’s helpful to acknowledge a message without spamming everyone in the chat.

Facebook Messenger does this well. Long pressing on a message brings up a small menu of reactions, which help engage with messages without polluting chats with “lol”s and “❤”’s

Polls and Reminders

WhatsApp groups are very popular for teams, and surfacing a quick way to create polls and reminders would be a helpful feature. Messenger does a decent job with them, but there’s scope for WhatsApp to go above and beyond here. By simplifying the UI, making it easier to add poll options, and allowing polls to be time-boxed, WhatsApp can make in-conversation polls a useful tool for groups.

Polls in Facebook Messenger

Similarly, Messenger has reminders, but there’s scope for WhatsApp to do even better. Reminders in Messenger stick to the top of the chat; WhatsApp could allow them to exist in the background and make them more configurable or recurring.

Messenger has in-chat reminders, but they will stick to the top of the chat until either the scheduled time or Judgement Day, whichever comes first

Snoozing messages

Gmail has a wonderful little feature that allows you to snooze an email. You can choose a time when you’d like to be reminded of that email and get a notification at that time. WhatsApp currently lets you set a chat as unread, but giving the optionality to snooze a chat or a message would be a delightful way to help manage an active set of chats.