TELEGRAM REDESIGN CASE STUDY
Telegram status feature
Do you use Telegram?
This is one question I have always asked my friends and they keep wondering if I have been paid to promote the Telegram app. Lol. That’s the power of a great user experience in a product. If your product has a great user experience, your users will promote it freely. Most of the answers I get from my friends are summarized into these two statements:
“Nobody to chat with on Telegram, so it’s quite boring for me”
“No status/stories to view at all”.
This gave me the motivation to redesign Telegram by adding a STATUS feature.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
First of all, I must commend the design team at Telegram for the work done on the user experience of the Telegram App. So far, telegram provides a greater value for its users compared to other apps which has made it very popular. It provides some features like:
- Larger group capacity for easy communication: Other chatting apps has a limit for the amount of members in a group.
- Creating channels for disseminating information.
- Ability to use more than one profile image: Other chatting apps don’t have this feature has it only allows for one display picture.
- Creating polls in a group.(which I used in conducting my user research)
- Creating chat folders.
- Creating secret chats for privacy of information.
- Unlimited Cloud storage.
- Animated emojis, amongst others.
You would say, after all this, then what else is remaining?, why did i choose to redesign it?.
But one feature that I believe will drive more people to using Telegram and make it more engaging is the Status Feature.
Why:
Most social media apps come with a stories or status feature which makes the experience quite interesting and lively for the user. It creates a room for more engagement on the app. Having a status feature provides a platform for users to get updates about what is going on around them.
PROJECT DURATION: 7 days
DESIGNING FOR THE RIGHT AUDIENCE. (USER RESEARCH AND PERSONA)
I conducted polls on Telegram groups to know the user’s opinion on having a status on Telegram. And being an existing app, I was able to check the user’s reviews on the Google Playstore which helped me to identify the user’s painpoints. The personalities are represented as:
A. Tobi is someone that has a lively character and loves socializing with people, enjoys using Telegram but sometimes, get bored of it and decides to switch to Whatsapp.
B. Ife is someone that prefers Telegram because it has a more professional compared to Whatsapp.
USER FLOW DIAGRAM
This contains the possible interactions that Tobi can make when using the telegram story feature: Posting a status, Going Live on Telegram, Commenting on a friend’s status. I made use of the existing flows used by other apps as making a new one will create confusion for Tobi.
WIREFRAMES
With this personalities in mind, I came up with rough sketches of possible solutions which i made into low-fidelity wireframes to help me focus on providing a great user experience for Tobi as that is the main goal of my design.
FULL DESIGN
For my main design, i made use of the color and typography used on Telegram app.
This is the link to the prototype .
EXTRAS
While I was ideating on the story feature and how to make it easily accessible for Tobi I decided to recreate the UI design of the Telegram bar by making a status bar that contains the CALL FEATURE, CHATS FEATURE, STATUS FEATURE, and MORE.
WIREFRAMES
CALLS
Then i grouped the calls into Voice calls and Video calls.
CHATS
As i did earlier in the CALLS feature, I grouped the Chats into Private, Group and Channels chats.
PROFILE
MORE
The other persona which is Ife most times would prefer not to have a status feature so i made it possible for Ife to switch on or off the feature.
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“If you are not where you wanna be, why you chilling so much?”
This advice has helped me to regain my motivation in accomplishing my goals during this COVID break, and one of them is completing 4 solid design case studies, this is the third one.
You can view my previous case studies here.