Swiping Left on User Engagement: How WhatsApp's Status Change Hurts UX

January 30, 2024

9 min read

“People ignore design that ignores people.” — Don Norman

Have you ever wondered what your friends and contacts are up to on WhatsApp? If you have, you are not alone. According to reports, more than 500 million people use the status feature every day to share photos and videos with their friends and contacts on WhatsApp. The status feature allows you to share updates that disappear after 24 hours, similar to the stories feature on other social media platforms. However, WhatsApp recently changed the way you swipe to access your contacts' statuses from the bottom-up style to the right-to-left style on mobile devices. This means that instead of swiping down to see a list of contacts and their statuses, you have to swipe right to see them.

As far as I can tell, this change happened to accommodate the display of Channels and or to align the WhatsApp status experience with the Instagram stories experience. According to the WhatsApp blog, Channels are a simple, reliable, and private way to receive important updates from people and organizations, right within WhatsApp. I think that this change is a bad user experience decision that negatively affects user engagement and satisfaction with the status feature and if I were the/a product manager on the team, I would have fought against it. This article is an exploration of my thoughts on the change.

A little about me though. My name is Clinton, and I am a producer of awesome digital experiences. I ply my trade as a product manager, and I enjoy working with designers, developers and quality assurance experts to deliver awesome experiences on web and mobile platforms.

My thoughts on the changes are varied and cover different subjects but they all converge on these themes:

- The importance of aligning user experience on a platform with user experience standards within its niche or market and the broader internet.

- A comparative analysis of swiping style choices on different mobile platforms.

- The impact of introducing novel experiences on user engagement.

The Importance of Familiarity in User Experience Design

When designing the user experience for a platform it's crucial to consider the market in which it plays and the broader context of the internet. One of the key principles of UX design is to meet the user's expectations, habits, and preferences when designing. This means that the design should be consistent with the user's mental model, which is the way that the user understands and interacts with the world. By aligning the design with the user's mental model, the designer can create a more intuitive, satisfying, and engaging experience for the user. However, the user's mental model is not static, but rather dynamic and influenced by their experiences with similar products and with the broader internet.

Users navigate various platforms daily, each with its own set of conventions and interaction styles and each shaping their expectations, habits, and preferences but often all eventually reconciling to the broader context of how internet surfing works. Deviating from these familiar norms can lead to confusion and frustration, potentially driving users away.

Consistency is key in UX design and platforms within the same niche often share similar UX elements. This consistency allows users to seamlessly transition between platforms. A sudden change in a platform's UX, such as WhatsApp's recent update, can disrupt this seamless experience and lead to reduced user engagement.

Historically, most social media platforms used a bottom-up swiping style to display content or what eventually became “permanent” content. By permanent content I mean all content that is not restricted to a 24-hour display period. Snapchat invented non-permanent content when it launched “Stories” in 2013 with Facebook and Instagram subsequently launching stories features in 2017 and 2016 respectively. With the launch of Stories, Snapchat also introduced the right-to-left swiping style for viewing friends and their stories.

While WhatsApp always had a status feature, for a long time it was text-only. Sometime in 2017, they updated it to accommodate the upload of media empowering users to share photos, gifs and videos with their contacts. The update took off among users because it allowed them to express themselves in a more casual and authentic way, without worrying about the permanence or quality of their posts. I personally am a power WhatsApp status user. I love the intimacy of sharing content with no shelf life to people that likely know me personally.

WhatsApp, known for its simplicity and user-friendly approach adhered to the bottom-up swiping style for accessing the list of contacts and viewing their statuses or updates. Sure, tapping on a contact on this list displayed the person’s statuses in a right-to-left fashion but that was understandable as uploaded statuses may take varying formats, sizes or styles. The consistency of the list of contacts and their statuses fostered a sense of familiarity, allowing users to effortlessly engage with the feature.

The recent shift to a right-to-left swiping style, however, challenges this status quo. Few places on the social internet require users to swipe right to left on lists of contacts or friends instead of the more common bottom-up motion. While innovation is vital for staying relevant, abrupt deviations from established patterns risk disrupting the fluidity users associate with their digital experiences.

WhatsApp's change in the navigation style of accessing the list of one's contact in order to see their statuses from the bottom-up style to the right-to-left style violates the principle of meeting the user's expectations, habits, and preferences. The change makes it harder for users to access and view the list of their contacts' statuses, which are one of the main features of WhatsApp. Users are used to swiping bottom-up to view lists of friends or contacts on most social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This is a natural and convenient way of browsing through content, as it allows users to see more information at a glance and control the pace and direction of their swiping. The right-to-left style, on the other hand, is unfamiliar and inconvenient for users, as it requires them to repeatedly swipe horizontally to see more content, which is less intuitive and more tedious.

The change also breaks the consistency and coherence of the user experience on WhatsApp, as it does not match the navigation style of the other features, such as chats and calls, which still use the bottom-up swiping style. This change creates confusion, frustration, and dissatisfaction among users, who may intuitively feel that WhatsApp has made a bad UX decision that negatively affects their experience with the product.

 Comparative Analysis of Swiping Styles

Different platforms employ different swiping styles based on their niche, distribution, and purpose. For instance, news websites often use a top-down swiping style to allow users to skim through articles quickly. On the other hand, photo-sharing apps like Instagram use a right-to-left swiping style for their stories feature, providing a more immersive experience. Each style has its advantages and is suited to specific types of content.

Comparing and contrasting different platforms that use different navigation styles for their features can help us understand how design choices affect the user experience and the performance of the platforms. Navigation styles are the ways that users move through the content and features of a platform, such as scrolling, swiping, tapping, or clicking. Different navigation styles have different advantages and disadvantages, depending on the niche and the purpose of the platform.

Some examples of platforms that use a bottom-up swiping style and platforms that use a right-to-left swiping style for their features are:

Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok use a bottom-up swiping style for their feeds. This means that users can swipe vertically to see more content from different sources, such as tweets, posts, or videos. This style suits the niche of these platforms, which are focused on providing timely, diverse, and engaging content to their users. It also suits the distribution of these platforms, which have a large and global user base that generates a lot of content. It also suits the purpose of these platforms, which are to inform, entertain, and connect users with each other and with the world.

YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify use a right-to-left swiping style for their categories and playlists. This means that users can swipe horizontally to see more content within a specific category or playlist, such as music, movies, or shows. This style suits the niche of these platforms, which are focused on providing curated, personalized, and recommended content to their users. It also suits the distribution of these platforms, which have a loyal and premium user base that consumes a lot of content. It also suits the purpose of these platforms, which are to educate, inspire, and entertain users with high-quality content.

The bottom-up swiping style and the right-to-left swiping style have different effects on the user experience and the performance of the platforms that use them. The bottom-up swiping style allows for more content discovery, diversity, and engagement, as it exposes users to a variety of content from different sources and encourages them to interact with the content and the creators. This style is suitable for platforms that aim to provide timely, diverse, and engaging content to their users, such as Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok. However, the bottom-up swiping style also has some drawbacks, such as information overload, lack of control, and low quality. Users may feel overwhelmed by the amount and variety of content that they see, and they may not be able to find or filter the content that they want or need. Users may also encounter low-quality or irrelevant content that does not match their interests or preferences.

The right-to-left swiping style allows for more content organization, personalization, and recommendation, as it groups content into specific categories or playlists and suggests content based on the user's behavior and preferences. This style is suitable for platforms that aim to provide curated, personalized, and recommended content to their users, such as YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify. However, the right-to-left swiping style also has some drawbacks, such as limited discovery, bias, and monotony. Users may miss out on some content that they might like or enjoy, but that is not included or recommended by the platform. Users may also develop a narrow or skewed perspective on the content that they consume, as they are exposed to content that reinforces their existing views or tastes. Users may also get bored or dissatisfied with the content that they see, as they may not find anything new or different.

In our context of swiping lists of contacts to see their statuses in WhatsApp, I believe that the benefits of maintaining the bottom-up swiping style far outweigh that of switching to a right-to-left swiping style. We are not organizing, personalizing or seeking content recommendation when we navigate statuses here. We are seeking to discover diverse, engaging, content from different contacts to inform and entertain us. We also like the ability to preview statues without notifying the posters that we have. I do at least.

By shifting from the familiar bottom-up swiping style, WhatsApp risks a potential decline in user engagement with the status feature as it makes it more difficult and less enjoyable for users to find, view, and interact with their contacts' statuses. Users might find the new navigation style counterintuitive, leading to a reduction in interactions with friends' statuses. The change may also reduce the motivation and reward for posting statuses, as users may feel that their statuses are less visible and less appreciated by their contacts. If not carefully managed, this decline in engagement could ripple across the platform, affecting the overall vibrancy of the WhatsApp community and ultimately defeating the campaign to increase the user engagement that I believe is at the heart of the launch of the Channels feature.

In conclusion, while innovation is essential in UX design, maintaining familiarity and consistency is equally important. The recent changes in WhatsApp serve as a reminder of the potential impact of UX changes on user engagement. As product managers and UX designers, we must strive to balance innovation with user expectations to ensure the success of our products.

So, what do you think of WhatsApp's change in the navigation style of accessing one's contacts' statuses? Do you agree or disagree with my argument? Do you have any suggestions or feedback for WhatsApp or other platforms or products? Please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this article. 😊