How would you improve Facebook Messenger?

Clarification questions (responses)

• Do you want me to focus on a specific goal as retention or monetization? (No)

• Do you want me to focus on a device category? (Let’s focus on the mobile app)

• Do you want me to focus on a specific demographic? (We can concentrate on the US)

• Can I focus on regular communications rather than communications with businesses or bots? (Yes)

The Product

Facebook’s Mission: (1) Bring the world closer together (2) Make tools for communities.

Messenger is an Instant Messaging app that allows people to send direct messages to each other. It allows sending text messages, images, videos, and more. In addition, it includes features for having video calls and creating messaging groups.

There are two separate apps, the Facebook app, and the Messanger app, while it is all on the same website.

Structure

I will decide on a goal to focus on, mention the users and their user journeys, and select a user journey to improve toward the select goals; I will ideate solutions, prioritize them and provide metrics for measuring the MVP.

Goals

Messenger is a mature product, so I wouldn’t like to focus on acquiring new users to the app.

I believe that it is expected that companies will not use the messaging area for monetization purposes since it disturbs users; Therefore, I will skip this goal as well. I would like to focus on increasing engagement in the App and, hopefully, drive toward increased retention.

Users and user journeys

1. A user is internally triggered to send a message to someone – e.g., I miss someone, It’s been a while since we talked, I want to share something, I want to ask something
2. An external trigger triggers a user – something happened, and I may respond – e.g., someone sent a message, a reminder to do something

Decision to focus

Since we are striving to increase engagement and retention, I would like to focus on external triggers that will remind or offer users to interact with their friends and family via messenger to bring them closer together.

Ideas

1. Messenger Birthdays – remind users about birthdays inside of messenger (dedicated area, inside of a chat of individual or a group).

2. Email Birthdays – Inside the birthdays’ reminder email, add a link to send a message (redirect to Messenger instead of Facebook).

3. Silent Chats – encourage users to renew a chat with an individual or a group that wasn’t active for a while.

4. Unread messages reminder.

5. Questions without a response - A reminder about a chat where the user wasn’t the last responder, and the last sentence included a question mark.

Prioritization

I would like to prioritize the ideas with the Reach, Impact, Confident, and Effort Model Score = (R x I x C) / E

1. Messenger Birthdays

   1. Dedicated area (90% | 4 | 90% | 4) = 81

   2. Inside of private chat \ Inside of groups (30% | 5 | 70% | 3) = 35

2. Email Birthdays (90% | 1 | 30% | 1) = 27

3. Silent Chats (90% | 3 | 60% | 3) = 54

4. Unread Chat (90% | 2 | 60% | 3) = 36

5. Chat w\o a response (90% | 1 | 60% | 3) = 18

I would like to create a dedicated area in the Messenger that will raise the awareness of friends’ birthdays.

MVP

• Add a widget below the search bar. The widget will present the friends having birthdays today (a list of up to 4 people with an expansion option).

• A button that allows sending a direct message to the person

• If the user and the friends are members of a group, enable the user to select which chat to open (direct or a group)

In the following versions, I would like to explore opening birthday card wishes \ emojis \ gifs \ text birthday wishes
 

Metrics

• The primary metric: Number of clicks on “send a message” \ “help him\her to celebrate” (% of users that use it monthly)

• Secondary metrics: 

  • Conversion rates of actually sending a message 

  • % of messages sent directly and within groups

• Counter metrics \ trade-offs: 

  • I would like to track that we don’t harm the average number of chats

  • # of birthday wishes as posts on Facebook 

Summary

I would like to improve engagement and retention in Messenger by creating reminders about friends’ birthdays.

The reminders will be presented in a dedicated area at the top of the messenger app and allow messaging the person directly or within a mutual group. I believe that it will create more interactions between people and will make them closer together.