I'm a little confused... I feel like most of these exist in some form already? I've seen chat likes, message indicators, notification reply, homescreen before.<p>Tagging in a chat app seems like it's trying to make a chat app be something it's not. Unless I'm wildly unfamiliar with how many people use chatting. (totally possible!)<p>That said, the timeline jump is the idea in here that made me say, "ok that is slick" I feel like I sometimes want to go back and find a photo someone sent me several days ago and I, well, don't even bother because I won't even remember exactly WHEN it was sent.
There's something about read indicators that always gets under my skin, and I'm not entirely why. Partly it's because it works against the idea that chat messages should be treated asynchronously, but It also feels kind of invasive? Like my device is tell on me for being indecisive or anxious about responding. Maybe I'm just weird but I've alway been curious how others feel about that. The snapchat style "currently viewing" indicator makes that even worse.<p>That said, the timeline and quick switching ideas are very cool. So many chat apps implement a text search and stop there, this is a clever way to find a specific point in time, or find specific non-text content.
Here's an interface idea for a feature I miss in the chat app I use the most (Signal): yelling.<p>It would be great if the app detected that (for instance) something is said in ALL CAPS (or with an exclamation point, or perhaps some more indirect, non-text-dependent, flag set but that sounds annoying) and _changed the notification sound_.<p>It would be great to signal that I need to e.g. stop cooking and look at the phone <i>now</i>, because something is happening elsewhere in the house, for instance.
Anecdotally, my own current UI gripe in iOS messages is identifying different variations of groups containing mostly the same people.<p>- My family
- My wife's family
- Both of our families
- My family but only those nearby
- My family but only those attending a specific event
- My family but minus one person<p>The current "facepile" approach really fails in distinguishing them... we've all been making mistakes sending messages to the wrong subsets.<p>I know that it's possible to name groups, but it's not something that I always remember to do (or care to do, for a transient conversation)
All chat apps (that I've seen) are such a huge step back in usability from email. It drives me crazy that I can't selectively mark messages are read/unread. Or that there's no threading. Or that I can't filter based on my criteria into different folders.<p>And since these are proprietary apps mostly on proprietary protocols I also can't hook my own code into it to fix the problems.
It's unfortunate that this focuses on mobile. Messaging on mobile is a solved problem mostly. It's the desktop that stopped getting its unique treatment 10 years ago. At this point every single desktop IM app looks like a tablet app in a window. And it's always a single window, too.
I just want to be able to tag an outgoing message with #silent to signal to the receiving device that I do NOT want to notify the recipient with a sound (for people or houses with babies that may be sleeping).
I love the tagging (bookmarking) of specific messages. For example, sometimes on Whatsapp I talk with people who have used some of my products and they give some stellar testimonials and would love to bookmark them and view them across the chats. But can see this helping me in many ways.<p>Also like the locking of specific messages. And the timeline.
How old is this?<p>> Prototypes shown above are fully programmed in Quartz Composer by Apple.<p>> The bouncy animations in the interfaces are powered by Origami, A Quartz Composer plugin from Facebook.<p>Quartz Composer has been deprecated for years now and Origami is now a standalone piece of software.
I love those recall features (tagging and timeline). Too many chat apps are built for fire & forget messaging, with finding older messages as an afterthought (or not present at all).<p>Case in point, I was trying to find a message in my Google Hangouts chatting history today, and I just found out that it's now split between "chats", "spaces", and "legacy hangouts". Chats that I've made from (what appears to me as) the same place seem randomly spread between those three. What a pain if I need to try a few different keywords.
I like the timeline view. Generally speaking iMessage searching is absolutely <i>awful</i>. Good luck scrolling back a year in a chat with someone you message frequently (in my case, my girlfriend). Literally took me over 2 hours to go back 11 months. All because some of the words weren’t properly searchable.<p>And don’t even think about looking for previous pictures in the conversation “info” view. Most of them aren’t there.
I'll share my idea, for Messages in iOS.<p>When you long press a message, you get a menu with Reply, Copy, Translate. I'd like to add "bookmark" to that list.<p>How to then access that list of bookmarked messages? When you click on the search bar of all messages, there are sections for links, photos, etc. I'd like there to be a section there with all bookmarked messages.
I'd like to support ID verification of the person you're chatting with.<p>If I want to chat with someone from FB marketplace (or a girl from a dating app), there is very little tooling available to verify they are who they say they are and not a collection of fake scam profiles.<p>Zalo has a neat feature that lets you "search" through contacts and messages, but if you search a magic pin code, it shows you hidden conversation views that don't show up in the regular search / recent conversations list.<p>If anyone is interested in building something to help with the identify issue, hit me up!
> We chose to use TouchID here to unlock the messages. One could also use a passcode or a FaceID instead.<p>I can visualize the painful security discussion with the PM/UX there. Sends me shivers.<p>"just use the thumbprint to protect it!"
Grouping bubbles is such low hanging fruit and makes scanning so much more simple, love it!<p>Tagging is great. I feel like being able to great your own graph of data from any app on your phone would be a cool api.