Helping users remember things to do from WhatsApp messages in time with a conceptual solution.

WhatsApp is at the center of everyday communications: both personal and at times professional.

Communications oftentimes lead to actionable tasks. We ask our friends, family, and colleagues to share a file, help us with editing an image, review our work, get something from the market, or even watch an Instagram reel. And they do forget! (So do we 😉)

WhatsApp is a bigger part of users lives than just a communications platform.

WhatsApp is one of the most frequently opened apps in India. An average user (Age group 26 - 35) opens their phone 47 times a day, out of which WhatsApp is opened 64% of the time. It is safe to say that opening WhatsApp is a part of a user's muscle memory, like opening TikTok, Instagram reels or YT Shorts.

WhatsApp is one of those apps that users open naturally as a part of their muscle memory.

Since 2017, WhatsApp has been adding features like stories, communities, and now payments (among other valuable features to enhance communication) to give more reasons to their users to keep opening their app.

WhatsApp announced a feature to Message Yourself in November 2022. For a power user, it is a place to store a lot of important notes, messages, files, etc. WhatsApp also lets users star important messages and let them access it either from individual chats or from a central repository that contains all the starred messages. Personally I do use this set of features to solve the problem of maintaining a list of to-do’s that not only comes from chat messages but also from the “real” life interactions.

The need to help users stay on top of tasks from WhatsApp messages starts with understanding how often actions slip through the cracks. Our research aimed to uncover these scenarios.

Objective of the research

• Validation of the problem
  • Extent of the problem/ how deep is it?
  • Awareness of the problem
  • Volume of users impacted.
• Understanding cohorts of users
• Is WhatsApp successful in delivering more than just chat?

Outcome

139 people were surveyed using this questionnaire:

Insights

Age group	% of people that acknowledge that there are tasks from WhatsApp and those who frequently have tasks from WhatsApp	% of people that forget about tasks from WhatsApp and those who forget more frequently than others	% of people that are affected because their recipient forgot
18-24 (35)	100% and 80% (29)	91% (32) and 40% (14)	88% and 42%
25-35 (64)	100% and 55% (35)	95% (61) and 25% (16)	92% and 35%
36-50 (30)	100% and 60% (18)	80% (24) and 17% (5)	64% and 12%
50+ (10)	80% and 30% (3)	90% (9) and 10% (1)	20% and 20%
Overall	99% and 61% (85)	91% (126) and 26% (36)

• 🧠 Everyone forgets: It can be a small action such as viewing a shared video from Instagram reels or a bigger task like making a bill payment.
• ⏲️ Frequency of forgetting the task varies between age groups, the age group between 18-24 (that also tends to use reminder tools) have a higher frequency of forgetting things to do from WhatsApp.
• Likewise, there are similar results when it comes to being on the other side, where their recipients forget things to do. 🔍
• The top use case, (from the survey) is, ❓ people forget to respond to messages at a later point.
• There is a 🙅 lack of active acknowledgement in users that there are many “things to do” that emerges out of conversations on WhatsApp, and more so, there is an absence of linkage between WhatsApp and a to-do list or a reminder tool.
• There was 👪 no distinction profession-wise; everyone was equally affected.

Insights

• 🧠 Other WhatsApp features like payments, “messaging yourself”, pinning or starring a message, community, etc. are not popular among users. 🧐
• ⏲️ Whatsapp is opened frequently General data suggests, WhatsApp is opened 27-30 times a day. The data I collected showed even higher stats (70), indicating users have a muscle memory for opening WhatsApp, similar to other apps like Instagram, YouTube, etc. 📈

Auditing of WhatsApp’s existing solutions

Customizable Reminders Empower WhatsApp Users to Stay on Top of Important Messages.

Ideation

• Central repository for all snoozed messages? Outside the list of chats and within each chat.
• In “Message Yourself” ability to create a task for yourself - timed - reminder
• Ability to snooze a message - cancel a snooze.
• Ability to re-snooze a message when the time comes
• Ability to send a timed message - this should require an approval from the sender? Complicated? - Ability to un-snooze later
• Onboarding on screen, and through stories, promotion through ad
• Remind about unread messages - like a digest - too much intervention? Should be canceled after 
• Has to be aligned to whatsapp’s simplicity and non-intrusive design
• Should there be an ability for the senders to send messages that create a reminder for the recipient?
  • Does that become intrusive? It may also become spammy.
  • Should the reminder work on both sent and received messages?
  • This can also be solved using scheduled messages.

User flows

Existing user flow

Updated user flow

Projecting potential outcomes and future directions: exploring user engagement, platform expansion, and integration possibilities

Expected outcome

• At least 10% of the onboarded users that set an alert engage with one of the actions in the notifications.
• At least 20% of the users that take an action on the notification come back to set an alert again
• In the long run, there is at least 10% weekly engagement on the feature by the users who have used at least once.

Next steps

• Alerts on WhatsApp for other platforms - Web, Desktop, XR
• Individual alerts to be treated separately in the notifications (like emails) (based on the response)
• Involve WhatsApp business:
  • Increased engagement
  • Reliability for the brand
  • Deeper penetration in everyday life
  • Product expansion
  • App to app integration like sharing. Ad tracking.