Meta, 2023
Read Receipts Controls
Give users control over who can see they read their messages
Project Overview
In 2023, Messenger launched end-to-end encryption to their chats. As part of this enhancement of privacy, Messenger also launched new features. Among those, I was the designer on edit, disappearing messages and read receipts.
Read receipt controls gives ultimate control to users over who can see they've read their message. There's an account-level setting that allows you to turn them off, but also a chat-level setting that overrides it.
💭 This project was a lesson on the importance of collaborating. This was a new space for me, and it was really important for me that I got the context of privacy implications right.
My role
👩💻Product designer 📼 Prototyper
📝 Research partner 📱Social media asset creator
✉️ Content designer
My impact
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Led design process from start to finish, implementing new components and guidance to the Messenger's design systems
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Collaborated with Messenger's privacy team keep privacy as the top priority.
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Led brainstorming sessions to decide the most optimal design solution.
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Created visual mocks and prototypes for marketing bundle shared in all Messenger's social media platforms and Newsroom articles.
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Closely collaborated engineering team to ensure the experience was up to spec.
Problem Statement
People want control of who they share their read receipts with.
According to qualitative research, people would avoid opening messages in fear of the other person knowing they read their messages. Some people might not have the time to reply in that moment, some people might not want to reply at all. Whatever the case may be, people need to feel the freedom to manage their read receipts. This was the top 4 most requested feature.
➡️ this is a read receipt
indicator
The Research
I audited the app to understand what kind of privacy controls were already available. Even though there was read receipt to some extent, it only allowed you to turn them off completely. Along with other research the team conducted, I was able to draw some conclusions:
👍 People are aware of the entry-point for privacy controls, which is a good thing!
👎 For the people who decide to turn them off, they are less likely to reply back, and that also causes frustration for the receiver, which is a bad thing :(
❓Other people don't use it all to avoid confusion with certain contacts.
We're introducing an account-level setting that allows users to turn off read receipts for all of their chats. Moreover, users have the option to also override these settings in the chat-level.
The Solution
Before
After
The Creation
I first created static mocks to explain the experience to my design team during our feedback sessions. This helped me polish the logic of where this should live in the settings, and how to better differentiate them the 2 controls.
Chat-level settings:
Account-level settings:
Since this was also introduced to group chats, there was some complexity on what each user sees. I made a visual reference to explain this scenario. Let's say there's a group chat with 3 people, and the sender turned off their read receipts indicators:
