Whatsapp group chats — a product which needs improvements

Should I leave this group? After all, half the time the conversations that happen on this group do not interest me.

But wait..

What if I leave and miss on an important conversation? What if someone posts a great job opportunity here?

Just in case..

I should just mute and stay.

Few days later..

Have the people in this group got nothing else going on in their lives? All they want to keep doing is sending messages on the group. Even though I have muted the group, but every time I see whatsapp, there is an urge to read the messages. A lot of my time is getting wasted.

Few more days later..

The 100+ messages per hour far outweigh all my perceived benefits of being here.

I quit.

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Here is my analysis of this important product called whatsapp groups:

Use cases where I have seen whatsapp groups work

• Work best for groups with less than 50 participants. I would say the optimal number would be around 10–15 actually.
• Work best when everyone on the group is there for a common purpose. If half the people are there to share jokes and the other half to broadcast only important communications, the group can never be effective.

In most cases, it is a combination of the above two factors. The smaller the group size, the more rich can be the communication. The larger the size, the lesser can be the chance of having debates and long discussions over whatsapp.

Use cases where I have seen breakdowns of such groups — where the product does not really serve the best interest of its users

• The larger the group gets, the unmanageable it becomes. If people have different purposes/thought processes behind the core agenda behind the group. Larger groups with people not sharing common interests/agendas are generally the easiest to fail.

So essentially, the size of the group is inversely proportional to the richness of communication. If both the size and content are too low OR if both the size and content are rich, the groups are seen to not succeed.

My suggestions/recommendations to how the problem can be tackled by changes to whatsapp group product (the product manager inside me is speaking) :

• Introduce a way for the user to start parallel threads on whatsapp. Allow group members to then subscribe/unsubscribe to specific threads. For example, in a 100 people group, not everyone wants to talk politics. Not everyone is a sports lover. So every time a topic is picked, it is bound to find its takers and skeptics. If one can fork out separate threads where only interested people get involved in the conversation which is forked out and subscribed to , while the rest continue to be part of the main group, used for essential broadcasts; a balance can be brought.
• Ability to run polls in the group. If a group is having a heated debate, having a feature where the admin can run a quick poll to get a quick sense of the group’s inclination, that can help.
• Ability to see messages of a particular user in the group. This happens when I need to read my managers messages from a whole bunch of messages :) Filtering out is impossible.
• Being able to set an upper limit to the maximum messages the group can send during the whole day (the admin can have a sense of this and set an upper limit/day).
• Admin should be able to see the activity of each of the group members and sort the members basis the activity. This is especially useful in professional contexts. Sometimes people are added to the group without really there being a need for them to be added at all. They continue to be silently there on the group where perhaps the admin can see who are the least active members (people who have never posted anything in the group, people who have never even read the messages on the group, etc). The admin can then filter out inactive users and may be remove them if they are not relevant to the group now or were inadvertently added in the first place.

Of course, these are all individual observations and suggestions basis my experience as a user of this product. Whatsapp can take a call whether or not they wish to hear the voice of a customer.

Till then, I will humbly request all whatsapp group users to be considerate of all the users in the group and try and maintain a balance between too much and too little. A little self policing can help keep everyone together. Or else, people like me will keep leaving groups where we can hold no more :)

This post was first published on LinkedIn