[HN Gopher] Interface Ideas for Chat Apps
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Interface Ideas for Chat Apps
Author : prathyvsh
Score : 57 points
Date : 2022-12-02 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (prabros.com)
| gumby271 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Chat isn't asynchronous. It's semi-synchronous. It's hard to
| have a conversation with someone who is not entirely "there",
| and so read indicators give you some hints as to their current
| level of presence.
| guestbest wrote:
| Before everyone seemed to migrate to txt messages and
| iMessage style apps like WhatsApp the only chat app that had
| a pounce feature for someone offline was ICQ. The paradise of
| messaging mail was incorporated with chats and thus a common
| saved history retrieved from a server was normalized. Chat
| from the IRC days was seen as more of a p2p application with
| a relay in between. If a user node didn't exist the user
| object couldn't receive messages
| gumby271 wrote:
| That's very true, asynchronous isn't a fair way to describe
| things.
|
| But given a hint about their level of presence, what are you
| doing with that information? What can you do after sending
| the message you were already going to send? Worst case it
| makes people send "???" as a follow up because they can see
| I'm coherent enough to tap a notification and assume that
| means I'm available for a full conversation. The opposite
| example is the typing indicator, which acts as a useful
| mechanism to keep a conversation ordered and flowing once
| it's started. Maybe an argument could be made for the
| "currently viewing" indicator being more useful, since it
| solves the problem of indicating I'm available for a
| conversation better than just "read y/n".
| comte7092 wrote:
| 1. Dismiss the notification instead of opening it.
|
| 2. Before read receipts, I used to get very anxious about
| whether I was being ignored, now I can see that the other
| person simply hasn't seen the message. Was that a personal
| problem? Yes, and frankly it probably would be
| significantly less of an issue now that I'm older.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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.
|
| Also like the locking of specific messages. And the timeline.
| Pelerin wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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!)
|
| 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.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I would love tagging in chat. People send each other helpful or
| entertaining things all the time, then 6 months later you're
| trying to find it and you can't remember when they sent it to
| you.
| jaywalk wrote:
| In iOS Messages, if you tap on the icon at the top of the chat,
| one of the things that gets displayed is a list of all the
| photos, links and locations from that chat. So as long as you
| remember _who_ sent you the photo, it should be pretty easy to
| find.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Except a lot of the pictures aren't there in my experience.
| It's a nice feature in theory, though.
| mttjj wrote:
| Scroll to the bottom of that slide-up. There may be
| something that says "X images in iCloud". You can tap
| "Download" to download them all.
|
| Also: Settings > Messages > Keep Messages > Forever
| joe5150 wrote:
| I don't now how iOS caches or retrieves that content, but I
| find it's not super reliable if the messages were more than
| a few days/weeks ago. When it works it's great, though.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| Discord, discord, discord, discord. But for real though it's
| the only app doing any kind of innovation in the space. My
| friends and I switched to it from GroupMe and by god the
| absolute power. Channels, per channel notifications, sane
| mentions, reactions that aren't awkward, threads, actually
| useful bots, screen sharing, voice chatrooms that don't suck,
| spoilers, embeds, nsfw tagged channels, real formatting, really
| fast search, channel topics, pinned messages.
| solarmist wrote:
| I use it to rate limit myself to not flood someone with
| texts.
| [deleted]
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > it's always a single window, too
|
| What do you mean... you want a separate window for the list of
| contacts, or a separate window for each chat, etc?
| grishka wrote:
| Yes, I want a separate window for the chat/contact list, and
| I want a tabbed chat window so I could keep the chats I'm
| actively engaged with at the moment open and easily
| accessible instead of having to hunt them down in the chat
| list every time I switch between them. Seemingly every
| desktop IM app in the 00s did implement some form of this,
| but then touchscreen phones and tablets happened.
|
| I also want things that don't have to be modals, like
| profiles, to not be modals. Again, this ain't a phone where
| you can only have one view controller on the screen at a
| time. I also want the media viewer to not take over my entire
| screen but be a regular window that plays nicely with the
| rest of my desktop.
| jjav wrote:
| 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.
|
| And since these are proprietary apps mostly on proprietary
| protocols I also can't hook my own code into it to fix the
| problems.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> And since these are proprietary apps mostly on proprietary
| protocols I also can 't hook my own code into it to fix the
| problems._
|
| I think Apple lets you leverage their Messages API (Disclaimer:
| I have not done so).
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/messages
| f1refly wrote:
| These are not "interface ideas", it's just a description of the
| telegram phone app.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| How do I access that timeline feature in telegram? That's
| really slick!
| stereoradonc wrote:
| There's no specific "timeline". In channels, once you reach
| the end of posts, swipe and pull up, and you are taken to the
| next channel. Channels work as broadcast lists (with
| unlimited subscribers). This is not determined by algorithms.
| You manually have to subscribe to a channel.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| 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).
| em-bee wrote:
| telegram has a silent message option
| prathyvsh wrote:
| An exploration of interface design ideas for chat applications.
| unwind wrote:
| Here's an interface idea for a feature I miss in the chat app I
| use the most (Signal): yelling.
|
| 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_.
|
| It would be great to signal that I need to e.g. stop cooking and
| look at the phone _now_ , because something is happening
| elsewhere in the house, for instance.
| gffrd wrote:
| If someone needed your attention, wouldn't they just call you?
| Or walk in to the kitchen?
| 1nverseMtx wrote:
| How old is this?
|
| > Prototypes shown above are fully programmed in Quartz Composer
| by Apple.
|
| > The bouncy animations in the interfaces are powered by Origami,
| A Quartz Composer plugin from Facebook.
|
| Quartz Composer has been deprecated for years now and Origami is
| now a standalone piece of software.
| charles_f wrote:
| > We chose to use TouchID here to unlock the messages. One could
| also use a passcode or a FaceID instead.
|
| I can visualize the painful security discussion with the PM/UX
| there. Sends me shivers.
|
| "just use the thumbprint to protect it!"
| janalsncm wrote:
| I like the timeline view. Generally speaking iMessage searching
| is absolutely _awful_. 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.
|
| And don't even think about looking for previous pictures in the
| conversation "info" view. Most of them aren't there.
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