Adding the Poll Feature to WhatsApp — Case Study
At Ironhack, I was tasked to add a new feature to the WhatsApp App. The catch, I had only 4 days to figure out the needs of the users, create a prototype, test the prototype, iterate and create a high fidelity working prototype! Ouf! Below I describe my adventure!
Adding a Feature
New Week, New Project! I was asked to develop a new feature for an existing app based on an area of functionality to explore. This meant that I had to rapidly come up to speed on the product, the users, and quickly iterate on proposed solutions under tight timelines. The chosen app was WhatsApp, and the feature was to add a Poll in group chats, and I had 4 days to do it!
WhatsApp Messenger is a free platform that allows you to send text, voice messages, images, documents, and other media, make calls among other features, over IP (VoIP) and is owned by Facebook.
Research
I started the research sending out a survey that was filled by 31 persons, this is what I found out from the answers:
👉 Most people use WhatsApp to organize events
👉 60% of participants say they combine Whatsapp with another voting platform
👉 Most of the respondents are Android users
These answers gave me some insights into how people used the app, but it didn’t give the main pain points of the users. In order to get the necessary answers and learn more about the users and if they could be interested to adopt the new feature, I interviewed 8 WhatsApp users. I approached people who use WhatsApp in their everyday life. I wanted to know, how they handle the organization of events with friends and family, and which ones were their main problems.
I asked open-ended questions; asking them how they go around about making plans with friends, and letting the interviewer tell me about their process. I asked questions such as “When was the last time you organized something with your friends and how did you manage to set a date that works for everyone?” Then getting more in details about how they solve possible problems with the limited tools existing in WhatsApp.
After these interviews, I finally got to understand the user’s main frustrations.
👉 They need to use other platforms to create polls
👉 It is hard to keep track of the votes, they keep getting lost after so many messages
👉 Some people forget to vote and it is irritating to be after them
👉The copy and paste option to join plans or vote was messy for users
Problem Statement and Pain Points
The problem statement comes after researching the user and is very important to know what user pain point needs to be solved.
Groups of friends need a way to understand and centralize everyone’s preferences because messages get lost or unread in group chats since they often end up re-sending links from different platforms.
The main pain points of my users were the following:
😖 Using more than one tool is annoying
😖 It is hard to focus on one topic when people text on a group chat
The user didn’t want to go to another platform to create Polls, then go back to WhatsApp, paste the link and try to get people to vote. The most irritating part was that people will start other conversations and the link will get lost.
Persona
After defining the user pain-points and a problem statement that reflects user needs, I created the persona based on the insight of the research. This would help me understand better the user, find some scenarios where I could explore ideas to solve the user’s problem.
Comparative analysis
Before getting into the ideation process I checked what were the other platforms the users were adopting to create the Polls. After creating a Heuristic Analysis of the options, I came to notice that the most popular and easy to use were the following ones:
Facebook’s Poll feature is VERY easy to use and simple. You click the button, Add the question, the options you want to give and that’s all! Is so simple, that it felt that it didn’t cover some of the user needs, as you could not set reminders, or it had no setting options.
Twitter’s Poll was very easy and SIMPLE. It had the same options as the Facebook Poll but it had an extra field to set the length of the Poll (by default it was set on 1 day). It felt very simple, but still missing some options.
Doodle’s Poll was a little bit more complete than the other ones since it included more settings. I liked this option, although for WhatsApp users not all the settings will be necessary (such as the location, adding notes, hide polls etc.).
Prototype
I first started with a paper prototype, the flow was very easy. You are in a group chat, tap the send a document icon, a nice sheet with icons will be shown on the screen and people will click — create a Poll. Then they just need to fill the fields and it is done! Poll created. I did some testing with users and it went well, so I jumped into the High Fidelity prototype.
Once I jumped into the high fidelity prototype, I realized it was not as easy, since not everyone will find the feature on the same spot.
We have to keep in mind that I was doing the prototype for Android in Material Design, and I am a heavy iOS user, so this was extra challenging for me.
One of the challenges was to decide where people will tap to create the poll. On my paper prototype, everybody will go to the bottom part of the app, but once I went to high fidelity, I found out that most users will tap on the 3 dots on the right top corner of the app to find the poll feature.
Regarding the settings and after doing some tests, I finally came up with the following screens. I removed one of the setting’s options I placed at the beginning of the prototype, for two reasons: users reported that it was not clear and they were confused about what it was for. And they didn’t really find it very necessary for a Poll.
With these settings, we solve various problems, one → we can set reminders so people can vote if they forgot and second → you can set a time when the poll will finish so it does not go on forever, and get lost. As well, there will be a poll archive on the group info, so people can access the polls at all times.
To keep the branding in mind was challenging at times. For example, when designing how the Poll will look like on the Group Chat, I tried different UIs.
After asking a few WhatsApp users, I decided to go for the last option. Everybody recognized more this option as part of the WhatsApp UI.
The other options were always confusing or didn’t quite satisfy the tester.
Final Prototype
After some more user testing, I got to the final prototype.
Learnings
Being involved in this project has been a great experience for me!
Designing for an existing product is a complex task! Most of the times a designer works in a company, you need to work with an already established brand and product so you have limitations or constraints when coming up with ideas or being creative. You have to be very innovative, but need to keep in mind a lot of aspects of the branding. One of my challenges was to work outside my comfort zone that is iOS operating systems. I got to understand how Material Design works and had a deeper level of knowledge.
It also helped me to know that you can not get too attached to an idea because sooner or later you need to change it, update or remove it from your plans.
Listening to the users is a big part of this process to implement or improve a feature. Interviews and testing helped to create a better feature for my user.
Thank you for reading! If you have any suggestion or question, please comment below!
