Charlie Dowd.
Projects
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My goal was to improve retention and engagement with group chats, which I did by designing a “smart mute” feature which distinguishes message relevance.
The first design would show an inline message if a loud group had been "smart muted". Most users dismissed it instantly or didn't understand very well. To solve this I replaced the wordy inline prompt with a simple "muted" icon.
Turning Smart Mute ON and OFF in was initially a toggle switch. Users hesitated on this screen revealing a perceived double negative form the toggle switch. Ultimately I moved the Smart Mute feature into the existing mute wizard as a very simple checkbox. In the second round of testing, all users completed the task without hesitation and with a sufficient understanding of the feature.
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Users needed a way to hear only relevant messages, because message relevance & user involvement are directly proportional to enjoyment. An automatically triggered mute that makes exceptions for keywords and rich data addresses this problem.If this was a real feature I would measure adoption and retention: do users actively enable the feature on chats? Do they keep it enabled?
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Future versions might incorporate machine-learning by addressing user behaviour patterns in relation to the content of incoming messages.
In hindsight I would do a LOAD of research on what defines message relevance. I was a young designer when I did this project, please forgive my oversight!
