WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus

Starting a new conversation is done with an unlabeled FAB on the main-screen. She had no idea that that was even a button.

Then there's four tabs across the top. One for taking pictures, because the Camera-App and the camera-shortcut in the conversation view apparently weren't enough, one for actual chats, one for setting your status, because that's clearly a similar action to chatting and should therefore be placed in a tab next to it, and one for calls, no idea why that's not just a button in the contacts list.

Then when you go into the conversation view, at the bottom you have a generic attach media icon, a take-picture-and-send-it-shortcut and then separate from that the send-voice-message button, sharing its place with the actual send-message button. That might've been clever design at some point in the past, but now you have those other buttons right next to the send-voice-message button, so it should share the look with those as it does a very similar thing.

Also, the unlabeled movie-camera-icon at the top does not mean sending a video, it means starting a video call. You could sort of guess that by the location of that button, but that's still not just obvious, especially not for my mum.

Where you can however now send videos from, is the Emoji-selector. Or well, it's rather GIFs. Reaction-GIFs, even. Which is why I'm not completely opposed to them having placed it there instead of in the attach-media-dialog, but now you have 9 tabs at the top of the Emoji-selector and three tabs at the bottom (also including the search), as well as a delete-key, which does not behave like a tab. And two of these tabs even share the same icon.

Moving on, when you mark a message for selection, you get 5 icons at the top. Two of those are the exact same arrow-icon just mirrored. One means "Reply", the other means "Forward". Even knowing that there's a difference, I couldn't tell you which one means which without first long-pressing on them, which my mum won't know to do.

Also, one of those 5 icons is a star and when you long-press on it, it literally says "Star". Not "Favourite", not "Remind me", not "Mark as Important". I don't even know what it does myself, so I can't tell you what it should say there.

Some of these problems are hard to avoid or hard to get right, but many of these are there, because they absolutely did not focus on being a chat application and instead had to turn the whole thing into everything and the kitchen sink, and then they're even making the individual features compete for a spot in the directly visible GUI, no matter how much it clutters things up, just because they want people to use them.

Due to network effects, competitors can't really have a big impact on reducing WhatsApp usage unless something scandalous and hugely worrisome (to the general public) happens with WhatsApp, which then causes many people to ditch it.

I don't use WhatsApp because it's owned by Facebook. So my following comments here should be taken with a pinch of salt. Telegram, which I do use, has been on a rapid pace of development for at least a few years now. If I had to guess, I'd say that Telegram likely provides a much faster, better and richer experience compared to WhatsApp. Just a few features that come to my mind on Telegram that I like and value - username (no need to reveal one's phone number to others), @replies to tag users, cross platform/OS and cross device sync, great search (global as well as within a conversation), and message editing and deletion after sending. Telegram also has bots, money transfer and other features. I'm aware of the comparative security related weaknesses in Telegram, but other ones (like Signal and Wire, more so Signal) that are better on the security front have a long way to go to catch up with Telegram on reliability, features and UX.