Make “Micro-Messages” Micro Again

Improvement Solution for WeChat

WeChat, as a super app that combines the functions of multiple apps, has played an essential role in over 1 billion users’ lives. Users use WeChat to communicate with colleagues, friends, and family, post and share their life updates, make small transactions, and do various other things through Mini Programs plugged in by users. The literal translation of WeChat from Chinese to English is “Micro-messages,” which indicates one of the developers' goals. According to WeChat founder Allen Zhang, he designed WeChat to be an efficient communication tool, and he visioned that users can “send and go” without spending unnecessary time on WeChat.

However, as there have been more features added to WeChat, and people have become more dependent on WeChat, WeChat has appeared less “micro.” In a few interviews and follow-up research researches, some patterns of concerts start to show. People want to rely on WeChat for both work and life while separating their personal life and professional life, but they can’t because:

1. All the messages are displayed on the same page without much organization.
2. Users can be easily distracted by other features of WeChat, such as
3. Moments, Official accounts, etc.

Asking and Researching

WeChat users mostly fall into three categories: private enterprise, self-employed, student, and public sector(Source: BusinessofApps, TechNode). So I closely interviewed a few users who are students, self-Employed, or private enterprise. Also, Peak WeChat usage occurs between 18–35, so most of my interviewees were within the age range.

Before interviewing the users, I thought a good way to combat the complexity of WeChat was to break down WeChat into “lego pieces” and let users choose which functions they want and build their own version of WeChat. After talking to users who actually rely on WeChat for both work and life, I realize that reducing the number of functions may not be the most efficient way of solving their problems. It seems that helping users separate work and life is a more direct and effective direction of improvement.

The Market and WeChat Principles

Compared with apps designed solely for communication, such as Messenger and GroupMe, WeChat is much more complicated and distracting in a way that users can tap on Moment to see their friends’ new posts. Besides, even though Messenger and GroupMe don’t have many features for categorizing contacts, their users don’t complain about it much. In contrast, the users of WeChat think the fact that all the chats are displayed on the same page is overwhelming. WeChat users and Messenger users' key difference is that the latter relies on email and other more formal communication methods at work. Chinese users of WeChat, which is the majority, tend to deal with work through apps that are with less communication cost and effort. And it results in that WeChat users rely on WeChat for both personal and professional purposes.

When brainstorming for a new solution, I try to keep a few principles of WeChat in mind so that the final solution would actually be applicable. First, WeChat views the efficiency of communication as more essential than the visit duration. Second, “WeChat is a lifestyle,” meaning WeChat is crucial both at work and home, and its users have developed some habits about WeChat. So the new design or feature has to be acceptable for current users and efficient. Third, WeChat is more likely to keep its own simple aesthetics.

Brainstorming, Designing, and Testing

My brainstorming process followed the chain of opportunity area, solution space, and specific solutions from vague to concrete from broad to narrow. After choosing the solution that I want to carry on, I created multiple interactions on the same idea and conducted user testings to see which version of the feature served the best, and then added final touches.

The Three Opportunity Areas:

I started my brainstorming process by coming up with about 50 HMW questions, asking myself and my brainstorming buddies how to improve the app from different perspectives and considerations. (eg. How might we let users use WeChat easier and more efficiently? How might we help users get rid of cluttered chats?) Then, I sorted the 50 questions into three groups and found three main opportunity areas, and analyzed the constraints of each of the three areas:

• Chat, Contact, File management: Even with very organized chat history, users can still get distracted easily by the various features WeChat has.
• Interaction between users and between the user and WeChat: There are privacy issues and how invasive WeChat can potentially be.
• Organization and separation of work and life: This opportunity area may require huge changes to the app, which may be contradictory to the principles of WeChat. It will take users some time to get used to the changes.

The Three Solution Spaces:

I continued my brainstorming by coming up with solutions in each opportunity area. Then, by grouping solutions that share some similarities, I picked three solution spaces and two solutions from each space based on the popularity of the solutions among users and the solutions' feasibility. Before choosing the three solutions, I conducted a SWOT analysis on each of the six solutions and made a feasibility/Impact matrix.

• New interface/new space — This solution space was trendy when I asked some users to vote for their favorite solutions. A separate workspace can directly help users to concentrate better.

Solution 1: a new interface that only contains three functions: Chats, contacts, and files.

Solution 2: Allow users to have two accounts, and they can easily switch between the two.

• New types of chatbox — I think the inclusion of different types of the box may solve the problem with the cluttering and disorganization of the chat history.

Solution 3: 24-hr disposable chatbox with strangers (users can text people who they know they would be only contacting once or twice)

Solution 4: Breakout chatbox within a group chat (Users can text people from a group chat without adding them as a friend)

• In-app helper — In the interview, I’ve been told that WeChat is a neutral existence, meaning it does not encourage anything nor discourage anything. The inclusion of in-app helpers will let WeChat more actively remind and help users to be more organized.

Solution 5: An in-app helper that asks daily/weekly/monthly/yearly if users want to group the newly added contacts or the old ones that haven’t been groped and if users want to delete some old documents and chats.

Solution 6: An in-app helper for planning and helping maintaining a balance between work and life.

I chose the first solution: creating a new workspace on WeChat because this solution is the most direct response to my people's problem, to carry out further design and user testing. An intuitive way to think about it is that the new workspace is a subspace of the original WeChat. With less function display and more selective chat display, this feature should help users divide their work and life better and help users become more organized. I think this solution goes along well with WeChat’s principle of creating an efficient tool and accompanying users as a good friend.

I started to develop the solution by iterating the way of importing chats and contacts, and the number of functions included in the new space. Here are the five medium-fidelity prototypes from the start.

By either showing the users the videos of the prototypes or letting them navigate themselves, I conducted user testing. And I found a few important patterns in the feedback.

1.The buttons should have better and clear indications.

2.Students tend to think that a separate contact list is unnecessary, while employees tend to agree that a separate contact list would be helpful.

3.The fewer clicks there are, the better the user experience is.

Reevaluation the three main components of the separate space: Chats, Contacts, Files, I realized that it was better to keep these Contacts the same as the original WeChat, and then this component lost its meaning in the new space. Furthermore, the Files function does not address the issue with cluttered chats. So the only helpful part is the new “Chats.” So I decided to narrow the idea of a separate workspace to multiple chatspaces.