UX Spec: Read receipts for DMs/GMs

Problem to solve

In mission-critical scenarios, visibility of the status of your message might be the difference between success or failure of a mission. Currently, we don’t show different states. We use a greyed-out state when the message is pending (not yet sent to the server), but that may not be obvious enough and may not be enough detail to truly understand the status.

In addition, most messaging platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp (among others) clearly display this status and it’s becoming an expectation for our user base because of this.

For our objective ‘Be as reliable as iMessage’, providing more transparency in the message status here could increase trust and make it feel more reliable.

How might we improve the visibility of the state of a sender’s message to increase trust in the platform?

UX Behaviour

Read receipts will only be available in Direct messages and Group messages.

Message states

Here are the different states we’ll have on messages.

1. Sending state

   1. We can decide to timeout the message and take it to its failed state, or, we can keep it in its pending state always and send it whenever you’re connected.

   2. The timeout can be an hour or 30 mins?
      Reason for the timeout can be that the user would not want to send it if passes a certain time.

2. Sent to the server

   1. This highlights when a message is sent and delivered to the user but has not been read.

3. Seen

   1. This highlights when a message is seen by the other user (by our best guess, where the message was visible on his screen.)

4. Message failed state

   1. No timestamp - If the message fails, we replace the sending and timestamp with the alert.

   2. Timer - If the message is in the sending state for 30m, we show this failed state.

Open

Details popover

Clicking on the check indicator allows users to see details about their message.

For DMs

Open

If its not seen, we will show this.

For GMs

If no one has seen it, we can show this.

Failed messages

Failed messages will be collected in the failed tab in Drafts & Sent.

System and Account Settings

By default the feature will be disabled both on the system and the account settings for existing and new users.

The user can enable it on the system console.

It can be in the Users & Teams page at the end.

It will have four options:

• Disabled

• Enabled (default off)

• Enabled (default on)

• Always on

Once the user enables it (either default off or on), users would get this modal.

Clicking on view message status settings take you to your account settings display.

When the user enables it, others can now see if they’re read the message.

Mobile designs