Problems With Modern Communication
I’ve always wondered why so many people (including me) are bad at communicating with others. Communication is one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature, as it facilitates a sense of connection and of community. It is the medium through which knowledge and emotion is shared. Yet today, even with the massive usage of social media, messaging, and countless other communication apps, the system still seems broken. Calls and texts go unanswered; blog posts lay unnoticed in the expanse of the web; people forget to talk to those they care about most; the social currency of likes and followers creates more insecurity than removes. Modern communication seems to ignore its implications on mental health.
Why is this? A partial answer is that we have reached a time in history where the ability to connect with others is no longer a problem. I can reach family thousands of miles away in a split second, effectively for free. I can reach millions of people with a simple website. I can work remotely with 90% of the effectiveness as working in an office. However, I do not think there is much thought going into fostering a higher quality of those individual communications. Technology has connected the world, but are these connections going to become net positive or negative? Are online exchanges positive sum, or just negative/zero sum? These questions we sometimes forget to ask when trying to build the next big thing.
At the risk of this developing into a cynical, vague rant about the state of the world, I’ll focus on a specific medium which I feel has the most room for improvement - Text Messaging. A mode of communication that has become so easy and so intuitive, yet so problematic at the same time. Improving this medium is for now tasked to Facebook and Apple but if they won’t, someone will. Here are some problems with current text messaging and suggestions for building a higher quality text messaging environment. Inspiration for some of these goes to this interesting twitter thread.
Message acknowledgment - People often send messages, especially in group chats, that they feel go unnoticed. This usually creates a small but additive feeling of isolation. Maybe something like a “tap to acknowledge” function or a more intuitive reaction method where it is clear people have actually read your message.
Message replies - When people send a string of texts, most people usually only reply to the most recent message, as it is currently difficult to reply to each individually. FB Messenger has a nice reply feature, but this needs to be universally available. Also, maybe some sort of way to incentivize this behavior, as I am often frustrated by its low usage rate. Or maybe in the future some advanced AI can detect when a text asking for a reply doesn’t get one.
Robust search - A text message thread between people often becomes an important log of communication where ideas, files, media, etc are shared. These valuable bits of information are also very difficult to find when the time comes. Searching message history needs to be faster and sensitive to different media types. I should be able to find that receipt I sent my friend a couple months ago without having to scroll endlessly through the message thread itself or an unending gallery of uncategorized photos.
Contact reminders - We often forget to keep in touch with our friends, especially when they are far away. There should be a way to add a custom group of close friends that you want to contact on a certain cadence, and then automatically populate their chats at the top of the screen if you haven’t contacted them in that span. Maybe even a nice icebreaker sent by a bot like “Hey y’all should catch up! What’s new?” Imagine how many relationships this can save.
Easy statuses - “Who’s down to get some food” is one of the most commonly asked questions on my chats. There should be a way to easily populate a status and provide clear visibility to people in a group who is busy and who is free (and what they want to do). The back and forth to figure that simple question out is mind-blowing.
Message scheduling - Usually if I need a friend to remind me of something in the future, this message is simply registered mentally and forgotten. There needs to be an easy way to set a reminder and schedule a message to be sent at that time.
Message categorization - “How’s everyone doing” and “What’s a good restaurant in SF” are completely different messages but currently are just treated as plain text. Barring some exceptions like links and media, every message is just text. Messages should be categorized and displayed as their type upon sending. A video should autoplay directly in the chat. A link or picture should not take up the entire screen. A restaurant recommendation should be stored as such. A flight number should be able to be tracked in-app (maybe with some third party integrations). Some apps do some of this now, but the experience feels hacky at best. This categorization creates a more engaging and functional messaging experience. Also makes it much easier to find these different message types later on.
Cloud storage - Files stored on Google or Dropbox are usually difficult to share with people using different providers/accounts. Storing automatically shared files in a group chat could be a much better experience for mobile first users. This way there is a chat file system that can be populated from a mobile phone and easily searched - from any device.
On demand video - Instead of video calling the whole group blindly there should be a virtual space where online users can just hop into the fun and talk (much better form of communication) with each other. Could be a really cool application of VR in the future.
Unsend - Not deleting messages that everyone knows you deleted, not editing messages. Just undo it. This can prevent many embarrassing scenarios.
Unread management - Your message feed should be like a todo list. If there is an un-replied message, no matter if you have seen it or not, it should be apparent in that list. If you intentionally don’t want to respond, maybe swipe and mark as read or something like that. Would be nice to have an “inbox zero” like Superhuman.
These are just some initial thoughts, but I think that features like these can help build a higher quality communication experience for the future. Each person should walk away more satisfied, not less, after communicating with the people they care about. I believe that developing with empathy in mind can have a large positive impact on the mental health of active users. We just need to focus on it.