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WhatsApp's UI is a complete mess. Trying to explain it to my mum has been near-impossible. Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the mai
by 482794793792894 9y ago
WhatsApp's UI is a complete mess. Trying to explain it to my mum has been near-impossible.
Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the main-screen. She had no idea that that was even a button.
Then there's four tabs across the top. One for taking pictures, because the Camera-App and the camera-shortcut in the conversation view apparently weren't enough, one for actual chats, one for setting your status, because that's clearly a similar action to chatting and should therefore be placed in a tab next to it, and one for calls, no idea why that's not just a button in the contacts list.
Then when you go into the conversation view, at the bottom you have a generic attach media icon, a take-picture-and-send-it-shortcut and then separate from that the send-voice-message button, sharing its place with the actual send-message button. That might've been clever design at some point in the past, but now you have those other buttons right next to the send-voice-message button, so it should share the look with those as it does a very similar thing.
Also, the unlabeled movie-camera-icon at the top does not mean sending a video, it means starting a video call. You could sort of guess that by the location of that button, but that's still not just obvious, especially not for my mum.
Where you can however now send videos from, is the Emoji-selector. Or well, it's rather GIFs. Reaction-GIFs, even. Which is why I'm not completely opposed to them having placed it there instead of in the attach-media-dialog, but now you have 9 tabs at the top of the Emoji-selector and three tabs at the bottom (also including the search), as well as a delete-key, which does not behave like a tab. And two of these tabs even share the same icon.
Moving on, when you mark a message for selection, you get 5 icons at the top. Two of those are the exact same arrow-icon just mirrored. One means "Reply", the other means "Forward". Even knowing that there's a difference, I couldn't tell you which one means which without first long-pressing on them, which my mum won't know to do.
Also, one of those 5 icons is a star and when you long-press on it, it literally says "Star". Not "Favourite", not "Remind me", not "Mark as Important". I don't even know what it does myself, so I can't tell you what it should say there.
Some of these problems are hard to avoid or hard to get right, but many of these are there, because they absolutely did not focus on being a chat application and instead had to turn the whole thing into everything and the kitchen sink, and then they're even making the individual features compete for a spot in the directly visible GUI, no matter how much it clutters things up, just because they want people to use them.
- barbs 9y agoAll of those things are pretty minor and employ fairly standard design patterns. I think you're exaggerating a bit here. The app is quite streamlined, especially compared to other apps like Facebook Messenger or Skype. I think if you were to remove any of the main features at this point, people would complain and jump ship to another app.
- RasputinsBro 9y agoCould you please clarify what you mean by "streamlined"? Because OPs observations were quite detailed, and "streamlined" sounds like a meaningless buzzword in comparison.
- Markoff 9y agowhy you dont install to your parents Signal? that's what i did, extremely simple UI, but still knows even SMS, video and voice calls, it's gotta be easiest messenger out there full of features