Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Gleb Sabirzyanov

A funny and sad story about designing a new feature for chat apps that solves a very big problem.

Exactly four months ago we, Wersatiles team, took part in the Uplabs chat interaction challenge. The task was to rethink a chat interaction flow for an app or website.

We soaked ourselves with work on this challenge. By analyzing the research results and combining them with our recent discovery of the societal problem called “communication crisis” we found a way to make communication via chat apps faster and easier. Our solution was to use speech recognition to turn voice messages into text. After that we posted the article on Medium about this very interesting finding.

Designing a chat to solve the world’s communication problems

Uplabs seemed to really like our post so they promoted them. Although we didn’t win the contest, it helped to get some attention.

Inside @Wersatiles challenge submission 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 → Designing a chat to solve the world’s communication problems https://t.co/QyBfea2cce

— @iOS_Up

We received some positive feedback. Everyone who got to know our idea liked it a lot. It made us think that this is a very good feature.

Why nobody responds? It’s really innovative project, can be too much impressive for this times.

So, we were dreaming about popular chat apps like Telegram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger implementing it. However, we didn’t know what to do, how to make them see our idea. We even tried to send a couple of tweets to Pavel Durov and Telegram, but they never replied. The idea didn’t leave our minds, but we didn’t do anything with it.

We designed a new feature for chat apps like @telegram! See the research and the design process behind it: https://t.co/ZZhW5OgllH https://t.co/0WZXetvhDC

— @Wersatiles

Finally, several days ago we remembered about our idea and decided that we have to act. After a quick brainstorm about our further actions, we came to a conclusion that we need to send messages to CEOs of Facebook and Telegram, as well as some employees who might help us push the idea forward. For each company we wanted to redesign the UI to fit their style. However, first of all, we decided to prepare the letters for every company and find people whom to send them.

Finding people wasn’t difficult. LinkedIn and Facebook search helped us a lot. There are even lists of the most authoritative employees of Facebook on the internet. Nevertheless, this process took some time due to the large amounts of people and information sources to process by hand. We’ve put some emails, personal websites and social profiles in one list and moved on.

Now it was time to prepare the messages to send. The first sentence was the toughest. It took us a couple of hours of brainstorming, disagreements, corrections, starting over and scratching our heads.

Right after it was finished one of us had a thought that never previously occurred in our brains:

Are there voice messages in the Facebook Messenger?

We didn’t analyse this app in our initial research and none of the people we interviewed used it actively, so we quickly searched for it… and this is what Google Images revealed:

It appears that the idea we were so happy about was already being tested by Facebook in Messenger. In 2015. And there are some apps that provide such functionality.

What a Terrible Failure!

It was a very funny and sad moment at the same time. Anyway, we are very happy by how it turned out. And we also learned something on this mistake.

Conclusion

The lesson we learned is:

Google a solution before prototyping it. There is a chance that it already exists.

Also we discovered that we are not less smart than the designers of Messenger, because we designed the same feature they did.

And we did it differently. We believe our solution has several advantages over their design. It may as well have some flaws, it should be tested more, of course.

We still plan on bringing this idea to life if it will show good results in tests. Maybe it will be another interesting failure. 🙂

We are Wersatiles, a team of two young hackers who want to design and develop for humans. Say “hi” to us!

Thank you!

Not the best way to solve the world’s communication problem. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not the best way to solve the world’s communication problem.

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