If I were on the product team at Kik
I am impressed by the direction Kik has taken in navigating the ocean of chatbots and AI in the so called post-app world.
Age-wise, I don’t fall in the demographic Kik is targeting. But, as a self-claimed product person, I took a swing at it to help me hone my product intuition. My fascination with and experience in the conversation products space made we want to think a lot more about the core product of Kik.
I came up with four situations where I would rethink the product decisions made if I were in a position to rethink and act on them.
(This post will only make sense if you have used Kik before)
Situation one
When I add friends by syncing my contacts book, Kik starts a thread with each of them and displays them in my inbox/homescreen.
Here’s why I think this shouldn’t be the way it is –
- When a new user wants to just add their friends from contacts book to a new messaging app, they do not intend on starting a conversation with each of them right away. For the most part, a blue dot on a chat thread means it has an unread message. Having that blue dot on every single new thread of every new friend that just got added increases the cognitive load.
- If a new user has too many friends, on her phonebook, who have Kik installed, it gets overwhelming to see so many new threads pop up in a couple seconds. The actual conversations that a user might have had get buried deep down in the inbox.
By having this workflow, the user will likely go through two things –
- A user might want to continue the conversations that he or she was having before the sync and will scroll down to find the actual, useful threads.
- A user might start deleting every new thread one by one. There is no option for deletion of multiple threads at once. This creates unnecessary work for a user.
Here’s how I would resolve the situation if the product team thinks this is a problem in the first place-
I would meet with the designers to discuss how to let users sync their contacts without disturbing the homescreen and still educating them on who was added on their Kik friends list from the phone book.
I would bring up two ideas I have –
- Create a new section in the homescreen below the recent communication threads and label it as “New friends added”. This wont disturb existing threads and will inform users of the new additions. I would not include the blue sign since that gives me the impression that something is unread.
- Have a new screen within the app for showing who was added.
I think I understand the rationale behind having new friends get populated in the homescreen. The homescreen serves as both inbox and a contacts list since there is no dedicated friends screen the way Whatsapp has. The blue sign nudges a user to start new conversations.
I get that but there has to be a better way of achieving similar outcomes.
Situation two
The welcome message of the Kik Team bot leads me to believe that the scope of this bot entails everything about Kik.
As a developer, I might ask questions about building a bot. As a user, I might ask questions about doing different things.
It feels like this bot runs on a trigger-based spreadsheet wherein a specific keyword fetches an answer from a pool of answers.
I believe “friends” and “bot” are keywords here.
I was a bit surprised here that product teams at Kik chose to only rely on users typing their queries here. All third-party bots on Kik rely on buttons to avoid as much reliance on NLP as possible.
I would consider either using the button-model here or extracting keywords out of user inputs and sending the user three or four buttons wherein each specifies a certain path.
When I say “bot” in my message, it would be much more helpful to get a few buttons that could guide me and reduce the scope so as to meet my request.
Using a simple NLP framework here to handle simple queries might be very effective.
Getting answers that are clearly not helpful could lead to bad UX. One thing that I have realized when it comes to bot interactions is that most people will be happy if the bot says something that somewhat relevant or throws back a question to narrow down the domain.
I would meet with both design and engineering teams to discuss whether we want to use NLP framework or do a buttons-driven conversational flow.
Situation three
When I clicked on the “Kik Support” visual above, the app did a weird thing. It would bring up a screen ( I believe it’s a web view) for two seconds for some reason and then a user is left with the screen below –
The outcome of landing on the profile page for Kik Support is what I expected. Nothing feels off about that.
But, how I got there confused me. I am sure there some reason for doing it, I just don’t know what that is or why that is useful to a user.
I would meet with both design and engineering teams for discussing this. The random popping up of screen does not feel like a design-driven decision. It feels like an engineering-driven choice for switching contexts (maybe?).
Situation four
When I go to the chat screen with one of my friends, the icon below is situated at the top right corner of the screen
The plus sign leads me to think I am adding someone or something to the chat conversation. But, it actually leads to user profile. Generally, in messaging and social apps, that location is reserved for icons that lead to user profile. When I see the plus sign, I get a bit curious and. change my expectations of what might happen when I click on it since I would think that Kik has something new at a place that’s generally reserved for profile navigation. But, once I click on it, I get a bit disappointed since the icon led me to believe otherwise. Maybe the users don’t feel the same way. But, it’s worth exploring in my opinion.
