Why is this product well designed?
Facebook Messenger is well designed because it uses strong typography, clear hierarchy, and simple workflows that give users the ability to communicate with friends and family.
What job or problem is this product solving for people who use it?
Messenger gives users the ability to do 3 awesome things.
- Keep in touch with friends and family.
- Interact with businesses.
- Quick access to support.
- Ability to place orders, make transactions, or find information through bots.
- Have fun with friends or family members.
- Video call with multiple people.
- Play games with others.
What are some weaknesses of this product?
Messenger falls short on two distinct fronts.
- Ads keep users from seeing more of their recent conversations.
- Stories are prioritized more than anything else.
Facebook as a whole has had a very clear business strategy of gaining income from ads. They've created a gateway from businesses to over a billion people in the world. It makes sense for them to pursue using ads across their platform. Unfortunately, the purpose and goal of Messenger is purely a communication tool. When ads enter the picture and don't conform to the standard patterns of a messaging app, it distracts and frustrates users. For the business it makes sense. For the users, it's an anti-pattern.
Stories was added to the entire Facebook platform for two reasons: to boost growth of DAUs and to keep Snapchat from catching up. It was a bold and well executed plan; mostly. Messenger, a tool for communicating, became a place where stories became a primary goal. Gestalt theory states that proximity creates importance through visual weight. The weight of stories at the top of the main screen stresses the importance that stories have in Messenger. Visually, stories have avatars horizontally aligned and use bright blue and green to show new stories and online friends. In addition to the emphasis on other's stories, the tab bar places empahsis on the camera for you to make stories with darker grey and the icon centered in the tab bar.
You have a chance to work on any feature you want on this product:
How do you decide what to work on?
How do you measure the success of your feature?
If I worked on Messenger's team, there's a few things I'd like to work on but I think a great bet would be to depriorize stories and emphasize the experience of having M as an assistant. Companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and even Samsung have started pushing an assistant narrative amongst their AI products. Facebook already has the foundation laid for M. Users can receive suggestions from M for contextual things in their conversations like restaurants, movie tickets, and even businesses' bots that are in the Messenger app/bot marketplace. In order to figure out if my hunch is a good one, I'd take a look at the number of story views per user, the number of stories created in Messenger, and how often those users interact with M. I'd see if usage for M is higher than usage for stories. If I find that users prefer interacting with M, playing games, and chatting with bots more than creating and consuming stories, I would start to pitch my thinking to the team with some early designs and prototypes while preparing some initial surveys and user interview scripts. Once I sell my team on the idea, I'd work closely with the PM and engineers to conduct user interviews and get surveys out to users in the app. If the surveys and interviews confirm our hypothesis, we would begin to work on prototyping a version of Messenger that makes M an assistant AI. Lastly, we would test our idea with users to see if our approach is viable.
Now that we've decided that this is the feature we want to build, we'll start to build it out. We would continue to track usage of stories, creation of stories, and usage of M within chats. We would also track the usage of the new M assistant chat. If usage of M both in the assistant chat and within conversations increases by more than 25% per DAU, we've definitely reached our goal. The way we can start to move that needle further would be to introduce M suggestions for Messenger bots/apps to install or connecting with to improve conversations with friends and family.