What’s Up” To “WhatsApp” — The information architecture
Did you know that approximately 42 million messages are sent each minute? Messaging is the number one digital activity people engage in. Over the years, technological advancement has led to the growth of messaging apps and texting platforms, surpassing phone calls as the leading form of communication — especially among the millennials. Among heavy weights like iMessage, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, LINE, Kik Messenger, and Kakao-Talk, one stands out,operating with a staff of just 55 engineers: WhatsApp!
Since Brian Acton and Jan Koum launched the service in 2009, WhatsApp has become one of the most popular text and voice messaging apps in the world today with over 2 billion users globally (June 2020). Between personal and business offerings, WhatsApp derives their revenue primarily from users of the latter- specifically from charging late replies to a customer’s question. For this paper, however, our focus is personal user accounts.
At a glance, WhatsApp may seem like nothing more than a text messaging app, but it can do much more. Over the years, the team demonstrated real world innovation by incrementally improving the product. After rendering the instant messaging feature in 2010, they added the ability to send photos so users could transfer media content. In 2014, after its acquisition by Facebook, WhatsApp launched the voice call feature. The next addition was video calls, followed by the ability to send GIF images in late 2015. By April 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, which meant enhanced data security. The WhatsApp team could drive these innovations because of the simplicity of the app, maintaining a neat and clean UI that was easy for people to learn how to use..
As an avid user of the app, I find WhatsApp the best of all the messenger apps because of subtle but smart design choices that were made. The interface is simple, the icons are meaningful, and its chat customization and call options are useful, fun and secure. Behind these design choices are visual elements, functionality, interaction, and navigation that has been built according to information architecture principles.
When creating an account, a user has to register with their phone number in the international number format. Unlike most other platforms, WhatsApp does not use special usernames, electing instead to identify users by their number. While setting up a profile, the user enters their name and adds a profile photo (optional). Subsequently, when the user gives permission, WhatsApp can access their address book, photos, videos and other files on the device. From here on, the home screen presents the user with a list of conversations — both individual and group chats. Here is a visual of the navigation of the app from the home screen (see image 1).
WhatsApp identifies its billions of users globally using their phone numbers as the primary keys. The phone number is the personal identifier to which a user’s metadata is tied. This includes device-specific information (hardware model, operating system information, browser information, IP address, mobile network information, user account information, device identifiers) and information about the user’s activity like the messages exchanged (texts and multimedia), time of delivery, connection duration and frequency, user location, size of digital content shared, and contacts from their mobile address book. This metadata reflects a wealth of details even at the individual level.
With this variety of data elements, effective information architecture becomes critical in the UI design process. Through information architecture, WhatsApp categorizes and recognizes the patterns that add structure, order, and hierarchy to this content, allowing users to easily navigate their use of the application and their understanding of the content. Patterns are used to highlight the visual hierarchy and communicate information more effectively. The primary category of data segmentation in WhatsApp is the chats, which are indexed by timestamp and listed in the order of most to least recent messages sent, on the home screen of the app (image 1).
Within each chat (individual or group), the conversation is similarly indexed, with the most recent messages at bottom of the chat window and older ones found as the user scrolls upwards (image 2). WhatsApp uses beige as the default background, followed by light green for the sender’s text messages and white for the receivers. This accentuates the simplicity of the UI and promotes ease of communication among users. Message delivered feedback is given to the user by ‘checks’ on the right hand side of the message — 2 blue checks marks indicate message is delivered and read; 2 black checks indicate message is delivered (and not read); single black check mark indicate message in que (not delivered, not read).
The secondary/minor theme in which content is further organized in the app is the alphabetical indexing of contacts in the phone. Users can archive chats of their choice to the archives folder, where they are again indexed as per the date and time of the last message in the chat.
The hierarchy and structure used to update the data in WhatsApp is ‘queue’, which essentially works on the principle of “First In, First Out”. The app maintains a queue for each user which contains the message to be delivered. When the user comes online, the messages in the queue are delivered and the respective chats are updated based on the date and time of the last message.
WhatsApp also makes it very easy to filter and search through chat contents. The WhatsApp search feature allows users to conduct a keyword search, as well as search for photos, videos, links, GIFs, audio, and documents, by using filters in the search feature (image 3).
WhatsApp is a user-centered product that has an intuitive ease of use associated with its functions. Every step in the user’s journey — from the moment the user launches the app to when they exit it — has been carefully designed to deliver a seamless experience. The primary goal per screen is cemented into simplicity and promotes communication among users with efficiency. Providing clear signs of the trail on the home screen, the app has all the features demonstrated in a non-intrusive way and tagged meaningfully, be it from opening new messages, starting a new chat, personalizing settings, or performing a search (see image 4).
One of the critical user flows of WhatsApp is sending a message to a contact (see image 5).
WhatsApp’s global popularity is due in large part to its accessibility, cross-platform functionality, and simple, straightforward features. The WhatsApp social network is unique in several ways relative to other social networks. WhatsApp is completely free — with no fees, subscriptions, or ads! The service uses a phone’s cellular or Wi-Fi connection to facilitate messaging and voice calling to nearly anyone on the planet, alone or in a group, and is especially nice for families and small collaborative workgroups. In contrast, other social networks are based on user membership and primarily focus on public messages where these messages are sent to all connected users (i.e these messages are called Posts on Facebook and Tweets on Twitter), and not through private groups.
I have, however, found that one issue users face is that they cannot communicate with friends and family who have not downloaded the app. WhatsApp only allows users with an account to chat with others within the platform. You can invite friends and family on your contact list to use WhatsApp but, unfortunately, it can be tough to convince others to join — especially if they already prefer messaging through other platforms. Another area of opportunity for the app is to offer face and photo filters that are popular on competing apps.
With a mission to create a better-connected world through simple, secure and reliable messaging, WhatsApp is no gimmick product and there was no looking back for the founders. It was acquired by Facebook in 2014 and continues operating as an independent app with more than 2 billion users worldwide in over 180 countries, who send an average of 30 billion messages, daily.