Reinventing iMessage’s Voice Memo Feature

Role: UI Designer

Timeline: September 2022 – October 2022

According to Earth Web, there are over 1 billion iPhone users around the world. With such a large user pool, there has to be something that users find frustrating. In this mini-case study, I will talk about the voice memo feature on the iMessage app.

The Problem

Voice message memos are inconveniently hard to navigate.

The Solution

Include a voice memo tracker and extend the message across the screen for scrolling power.

*Before continuing, I’d like to inform you that these changes were made on apple on their latest IOS 16.1.1 update.*

Issue

You can’t navigate through your voice memo like how you would on a music player or recording app. Instead, the user has quite a journey to access the voice memo and allow the user to playback and scroll through the memo.

Opportunity

Include a voice tracker on the memo.

Issue

Adding a tracker is nice, but how accurate is the user’s scrolling power? What if the user can’t see very well? How can I design this to meet accessibility standards?

Opportunity

I extended the voice memo across the screen, which could be helpful for longer voice messages, giving the user more scrolling power.

Issue

When you hold the message, the memo becomes an overly sized mp3 player image. It’s bulky and takes up the entire screen.

Opportunity

Replacing the mp3 image, I kept the style of the voice memo consistent with the text messaging look. And then, I incorporated the scrolling feature presented earlier.

REFLECTION

Lessons Learned

Although this was a very quick mini-case study, I learned that even the standard, leading products with over 1 billion users have opportunities of growth and ways to improve products for users to use more efficiently.