Nantanaa Mutharasu
Product Designer
Research Driven
Creative Problem Solving
Check out my projects
Overview
To come up with a UX solution to mute notifications and to @mention a specific participant in a message conversation in Global Relay's messaging app.
Background
As a Global Relay message app user, one can be bombarded with hundreds of message notifications in their app at a time.
The app is designed such a way users can have conversation with one person, multi-party group and channels. To create a better user experience (and keep users sane while working), I was tasked to design a solution that could mute notifications. The user should be able to quickly mute and unmute a conversation.
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On the other hand, in a multi-party group conversation where one can have 50 participants, it is easy to overlook if a user has mentioned a specific participant with an important message that requires visibility from others. Here, I was tasked to design a solution to allow users to @mention another user.
My Role
I lead this project on all platforms, iOS and Android, researched, created wireframes, presented to stakeholders and developers and came up with detailed solutions for phase 1 and 2.
Objective
Feature 1: Allow Global Relay users to Mute conversations from the app's Hub and Feedview
​Feature 2: Allow Global Relay users to mention (@mention) another participant.
Research
I used two research methodologies to run this project;
Competitive Analysis
Since muting a conversation and @ mentioning is common in many messaging apps, I decided to use competitive research and analysis to better understand this two features.
I looked at Slack, Whatsapp, Teams, WeChat, Facebook, Signal.
Behavioral Studies
I then selected frequent users of these applications and Global Relay app and observed how they interact with the specific features in the app. I discovered some pain points that can be addressed in the GR app. ​
Ability to quickly mute a conversation
To be able to mention a participant who is not in the group
Alert users that they have been mentioned even in a muted conversation
Design
Once the discovery period was completed, I started to design the wireframes.
Below the design is split into Feature 1 (Mute) and Feature 2 (@mention)
Feature 1 (Mute)
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Feature 1 Findings
Based on user testing, we found several success criteria for Mute conversations.
Users can quickly mute and unmute conversations
Push notifications are stopped which gives users a better experience using the app
Dulled notification indicator in chat row helps distinguish between muted and active conversations
Improvements
From the feedback, it was understood that users will like to have control over the duration of mute if their conversations are temporarily overloaded. For example, users have the option of muting a conversations for several hours, days or year.
Feature 2 (@mention)
Once I was able to establish a clear look for the widget, I built the rest of the flows
@mention a participant
@mention notification in hub
Feature 2 Findings
Based on user testing, we found several success criteria for @Mention conversations. ​
Users get notified that they have been @mentioned even if the chat is muted
Users now have the ability to mention any user in the conversation by typing @ symbol in the text field.
Users also have the ability to mention all users in the group by typing @ (list shows the word ALL) or @all
Users can even look for a participant to mention by entering one character after the @ symbol and the list filters to match contacts.
Outcome
These two part initiative went through many iterations. This design was successfully moved to UI design and then developer handoff.