12 tips for designing a better group chat experience
By: Max Masure
Tags: Messaging, UX, Product Design

Did you feel that shift in the last years? We used to talk a lot in forums (public or private). I used to be part of the weird belgium website www.parano.be in the early 2000. A role playing game website that was based out of a huge forum with accreditations to access certain parts of it. Everything was about talking to other people, through different topics and threads.

This time seems to be over. We are now an instant messaging apps crowd. We all use messaging apps all the time, every day, with everyone. Through Apple messages, Facebook Messenger, even with customer services. Those are mostly one-on-one chats and then we have the groups messages. The annoying and yet comforting group messages.

You hate it as much as you love it. You hate getting all those notifications when a group of friends is trying to fix a date to meet, yet, you love that you are part of the flock. That you are not missing out.

As we are shifting more and more into instant messages vs topic forums, there are a few best practices that will need to be set in order to get the best of this medium. Because, yes, group messages can rapidly become a mess as everyone is talking at the same time, some topics are lost because of the frequency of the messages…

As I am working right now on a similar product, I wanted to share a few tips to build a successful group chat:

1. Show that someone is typing

On a group chat, the responsiveness is critical. You want the users to feel that other people are either reading them or typing a new message. You want to show activity.

I found this interesting video explanation on how long you see the typing animation on different messaging apps.

Best practice is to also show where are the new unread messages, usually with a thin line on the chat. You can alo bring the user back to the first unread message instead of the latest posted messages if you want them to care of what they missed while being away.

2. “Like a message” feature

Even better, you can let the other users that someone liked their message or the picture they just posted. This is not new as we like stuff on Facebook for many years now. But inside a private chat, that’s pretty new and I can only show you one (good) example with GroupMe.

GroupMe allows the members of a chat to like messages of whatever has been shared

I strongly believe that we are saying a lot by just hitting the Like buttons or just adding an emoji instead of a full reply with words. We said to the other person that we care, that we are here and liking their stuff. That’s already far more than most interactions we can get usually in real life.

GroupMe even has a section when you can see who or which likes were the most popular on your group chat. A place you can go to remind you how people love you. The same way you go back to your Instagram account and stare at those likes you earned from the picture you posted last night. We need proofs of love. That we are, at least, not seen as indifferent to other people.

WhatsApp tried the “like” feature before GroupMe but they did it too shyly with an option to “star” a message through the extra menu when you tap and hold on a message. I am not even sure anyone even used this feature as it is too hidden.

Be proud of your features and show them when you know they will be useful to your users! Otherwise, what’s the point?

3. Reply to a message

Moving from forums to messaging apps is tricky. Even Facebook tried a few approaches before implementing recently the “reply” feature on posts where you can directly reply to someone and create a 2 levels thread.

Into a group chat, that’s even trickier. Every conversation is happening at the same time and it is hard to follow who is replying to whom.

Telegram “Reply” feature

Telegram did a nice job by introducing the “Reply” feature where you can tap on a message and reply to it. It’s using the quote metaphor previsouly used in forum where you first show the original message and then the second user’s answer. It’s definitely a step in the right direction, and I think we can continue to work on that.

4. Hashtags

Another way to keep track of multiple conversation is to use what Twitter introduced and democratized: the hashtag. (99percent invisible podcast episode of the hashtag history is super interesting, as always ;)

Telegram “Hashtags” feature

That way you create multiple thread without to have to create topics like we used to do on forums, which ended up with tons of dead conversations on a plethora of topics, very often duplicated topics because it was hard to know if the subject had already been treated. Hashtags bring that flexibility where you can tap on one hashtag and read or see everything that has been said or shared on that subject. Instagram and Twitter got their success with those. Group chats could also benefit from this, like Telegram believes. They launched the Supergroup feature in November 2015 to meet a need for their communities that wanted bigger group chats. Until then, you had a 200 persons cap for each group chat. That’s already a lot of people to handle but apparently the need to move up this cap to 1,000 members in a group chat was strong enough to launch the Supergroup feature.

5. Mentions to grab attention of a specific person

When you are interacting with so many people, you need a way to direct your message specifically to someone or to a bunch of persons. Here again, we have good decade of experience with the @ symbol that is used in a lot of digital products now. Twitter of course, Instagram, Slack, …. So it seems pretty natural to incorporate the mentions into group chats.

Google + used their own mentions system with the “+”. Yeah why not trying to be different? But sometimes using the most common habit the users have is the best move.

Telegram “Mentions @” feature

Telegram, again, thinks so too. And it’s interesting how they incorporated the mentions @ system that goes beyond the Notifications settings: if someone sends a message you won’t get an alert but if this message includes your name with the @, you will get a notification. Great rule to make sure important messages are not missed.

6. Stickers

This year I interviewed some millenials users who were active on messaging apps. My goal was to discover how they were sharing stuff through chats.

One of the funny things I noticed was that Emojis and Stickers were definitely a way of communication that was almost replacing actual words.

Facebook Messenger understood that very early when they launch the Stickers feature. They even extended that to the public posts. If you want a group chat that stick (ho ho) to people you need to give them fun stuff to share. Stickers, Emojis, viral videos, GIFs… They will stay where they can share those stuff the fastest and if they are the most accurate to what they wanted to share.

Number one reason someone would share something on a chat? To make some friends laugh. That’s it. People want some fun.

7. Smart emoji suggestions

Talking about Emoji, we are totally learning a new language. Cavemen were drawing stick figures to share their adventures or their feelings. We are doing the same, except our cave drawings are on a smartphone screen.

Expressing feelings is still as difficult as it was 30,000 years. And Emoji is one way to express them more easily. Even more easily, is the Emoji Type and Minuum keyboards that suggest Emoji according to what you just wrote. I can see that becoming the norm on all messaging apps soon.

Emoji Type keyboard suggests emoji related to your sentence

Minuum suggest Emoji, showing them when it seems that you finished your sentence.

8. Quick access to share pictures, videos or screenshots

From the UX research and user interviews I conducted earlier this year, I discovered (or confirmed my assumptions I should say) that we love sharing stupid stuff on chats. This includes viral videos and stupid GIFs. But also screenshots. We share screenshots a lot. More often that actual URL. On my study, I got some users showing me their group chats history and how they shared a screenshot of an Instagram picture instead of sharing the link to this Instagram picture.

Take a screenshot, as fast as you would blink, and share it to your crowd. “Hey guys! See what I just saw?”

iOS 9 release got this right by ordering the photo folders by Selfies and Screenshots. It makes the sharing way faster.

Dream feature? Take and share a screenshhot directly from the app itself.

iOS 9 added 2 new folders in the photos albums: Selfies and Screenshots

9. GIF library

GIF became the new kid on the block for the past years. A lot of messaging apps included a GIF library but very few of them did a very good job. It’s usually messy and very slow.

The best implementation of a GIF gallery was by Kik. Searching for a GIF can be painful. You kind of know which feeling or expression you want to convey but it’s often hard to describe it with words. For those of you who used Giphy random GIFs on Slack, you know what I mean when you wanted a taco GIF and you actually send a Titanic GIF to your colleagues (WTF Giphy?!).

So Kik did an awesome job with their “Tap en Emoji to find GIFs”. Because, yes, we are so familiar with Emoji right now that we know which Emoji will describe our feeling, so why not using them to search GIFs? It works perfectly!

Kik did an awesome job with their “Tap en Emoji to fing GIFs”

10. (fast) Share location

Apple Messages added this feature a while ago. But it’s kind of hidden on the details of the chat itself and it’s super slow to be triggered. A lot of users I interviewed told me they rarely use it because it was too slow to be sent, specially the feature that share your location for 1 hour or a day.

Other apps seem to do a better job, which is critical on this situation because you want to share your location right now. If it takes longer than actually typing the address, you missed the point.

GroupMe share my location

11. Smart mute system

One big pain point in group chats is the notifications. You should always give an options to mute conversations. It could be for a specific conversation or for the whole app. Facebook Messenger and Groupme for example allow you to pause notifications for 1 hour to 24 hours, or to turn them off completely for a specific chat.

The more precise you can get the better notifications rate you will get. Dream feature? Link the app with your calendar so every time you have a meeting, the app is going mute automatically.

12. Schedule events

When we talk specifically about group chats, we have to talk about planning stuff. That’s usually the big pain point: someone suggest something, but someone else can’t make it, the place is not vegan or too far from Manhattan etc… The best tool even invented for me was Doodle. This allowed users to answer which dates they were available. This tool never really evolved over the past years (decade even?) but we can now find those kind of features directly embedded on a lot of apps.

For events, GroupMe follows Facebook events planner. The beauty of having a messaging app with embedded features is that you see the event show up as a card inside the chat so everything is done directly in the chat. Users can directly reply “I’m going” or not without having to move to a new screen.

GroupMe events planner embedded on the chat

It’s a pretty neat experience and not so new but it’s definitely getting more and more implemented. Facebook Messenger is clearly moving to this, following WeChat that does that in China for a while now.

Lots of new features embbedded inside chats will come on our hands, that’s for sure. Facebook Messenger is already on that road with their dedicated app store inside the chat menu. Everyone wants to be part of it to leverage the incredible numbers of users that are in Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

Plethora of Facebook Messenger add-ons

For product designers, our goal will be to find the right balance between matching the users actual behavior and need with business models that want to get their money out of this expanding market that messaging apps is.