Glanced Receipts for iOS

UCSC UX Coursework
Project Overview
In order to showcase prototyping proficiency, we (my classmate and I) generated an idea, conducted preliminary research, designed, and iterated. The product is an alternative modality to "read receipts" offering a hybrid state between "delivered" and "read."
Research Methods:
Survey
Interviews
Wald Confidence Interval
User Testing
Design Methods:
Hand Sketching
Process Flow Analysis
User Personas
Iterative Design
Software Used:
Figma
R
Qualtrics
Excel

Contents

  1. Ideation
  2. Research
  3. Discovery
  4. Design Documents
  5. Low Fidelity Prototype
  6. High Fidelity Prototype
  7. Conclusion
  8. Bibliography

Ideation

Our idea began as "Average Response Time Receipts," an alternative to read receipts in which users broadcast their average response time to recipients in a text conversation. This led us to the ripe design space within the architecture of read receipts in general.

This was simply a brainstorm. We drew up some initial sketches, but once we started the research and design in earnest, we found a rich design area we did not anticipate...

Research

We conducted an online poll and five user interviews to explore trends around messaging, and one finding stood out above the others...

Quantitative analysis
Seeing the above trend, we computed a Wald confidence interval. From it, we can say with 95% confidence that between 59% and 97% of read receipt users are circumventing the read receipt (p<.05).

Users of read receipts who find ways to view a message without triggering the read receipt:

Discovery

Users are cheating the system! Many people use read receipts (over half of those polled and interviewed). Of those people, nearly all of them are coming up with ways to circumvent the system that they opted into.


Literature Review

Negotiations with read receipts as the sender of the message:
  • Read receipts induce negative feelings in some users such as “anxiety”, “jealousy”, “loneliness,” and feeling “ignored” (Lynden et al., 2017, p. 14; Kato et al., 2017; Hoyle et al., 2017).
  • A message that’s been marked "Read" rather than just "Delivered" can end up making the sender awaiting a reply feel worse (Kato et al., 2020).
  • 326 people out of 368 “reported making use of the information to see who has received their message but not yet responded” (Hoyle et al., 2017, p. 3).
Negotiations of read receipts as the receiver of the message:
  • Participants engage in behaviors to avoid triggering the read receipt but still view a message's content.
  • People "used message previews as a way of temporarily suspending connection to avoid upsetting their friends and contacts" (Gangneux, 2018).
  • 43% of participants in a study said they “often postpone opening a message, instead reading the message in an “unopened” status” (Vorderer, 2016, p. 701).

Conclusion

Read Receipts do need an overhaul, but Average Response Time (our original idea) is not the design space where the research points. Our inclusive design methods indicate Read Receipt senders need a way to view messages without always sending a read receipt.

Design Documents

Our user interviews revealed an in-depth picture of what is going on, and who we are designing for. To visualize this, we created a series of design documents that keep information in focus.

User Personas and accompanying Empathy Maps
Process Flows
Read Receipt Sender
Read Receipt Viewer
Information Architecture

Low Fidelity Prototype

We created a hand drawn mock-up of what the concept should look like. We used this to get feedback from our instructor, peer designers, and a small number of prospective users. On a full-length project, we would test this prototype more extensively before moving to digital prototyping, but the fast pace of this course meant that we had to demonstrate understanding of the process and move on.

High Fidelity Prototype

For the high fidelity prototype, we used Figma to create a more visually realistic model. This was one of our earliest introductions to Figma- Our flows were simple and our design file was much less organized than in my more recent projects. Still, it was a good exercise and the outcome meet the course requirements.

Conclusion

This grad school assignment aimed to give us practice in moving through the design process, but rather than the design outcome here, I am more satisfied with the research discovery. From our very limited classroom-scoped research, the responses we got from prospective users led us to pivot our design very early on. To me this indicates that we were asking the right questions.

Bibliography

Gangneux, J. (2019). Logged in or locked in? young adults’ negotiations of social media platforms and their features. Journal of Youth Studies, 22(8), 1053–1067. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2018.1562539

Hoyle, R., Das, S., Kapadia, A., Lee, A. J., &amp; Vaniea, K. (2017). Was my message read? Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025925

Kato, Y., Kato, S., &amp; Ozawa, Y. (2017). Nobody read or reply your messages. International Journal of Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning, 7(4), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijcbpl.2017100101

Kato, S., Kato, Y., &amp; Ozawa, Y. (2020). Reply speed as nonverbal cue in text messaging with a read receipt display function. International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, 16(1), 36–53. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijthi.2020010103

Lynden, J., & Rasmussen, T. (2017). Exploring the impact of ’read receipts’ in Mobile Instant Messaging. Tidsskrift for Medier, Erkendelse Og Formidling, 5(1). Hentet fra https://tidsskrift.dk/mef-journal/article/view/28781‍Vorderer, P., Krömer, N., &amp; Schneider, F. M. (2016). Permanently online – permanently connected: Explorations into university students’ use of social media and Mobile Smart Devices. Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 694–703. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.085

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