Feature Background

Introduction

Message Priority and Acknowledgements (“MPA”) is a feature closely related to the discussion on the potential implementation of read-receipts, another highly-requested feature that is present in many other collaboration platforms: both those targeted for workplace collaboration (e.g. Microsoft Teams) but also those targeted for social use (e.g. Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp).

While knowing when a message has been read is something that can be helpful for the sender to know, it was brought up that implementing read-receipts for all messages may not be conductive to a healthy working environment. For instance, some users may feel anxious or pressured to respond to a message knowing that it can be seen that they have read it - and vice versa: some users may feel like they are being ignored when sending a message to a channel and receiving no responses despite their message having been read by multiple people.

However, there are many cases where messages may be important or urgent, in which case an acknowledgement is crucial to making sure that action is taken. This could be anything from a safety-related announcement from a team manager to the identification of a critical stability issue by an engineer after a new release.

As we build Message Priority and Acknowledgements, it will allow us to explore the option of adding some sort of message receipt to the Mattermost platform. Since MPA is more aligned to the explicit acknowledgement of a message compared to the implicit nature of automatic read-receipts, we believe it to be less disruptive to users. This hypothesis is further driven home by the fact that MPA will be reserved for messages deemed Important or Urgent - and won’t be something that affects all the messages in a channel.

Ultimately, it’s clear that some functionality is needed for:

• Delivering important or urgent messages in a medium such that they stand out

• A way to track the receipt and actions taken on these important or urgent messages

MPA is the first step in adding this functionality. Once shipped, we can leverage customer feedback to determine if the use-cases of automatic read-receipts have been satisfied or if a separate new feature is needed.

More on these use cases is outlined on the Use Cases page, and a full detailed description of these features can be found on the Core UX page within this Confluence space.