WhatsApp Status

Private Mentions

My role: Lead designer on WhatsApp Status, a vertical team with 4 designers

I lead the design and strategy for WhatsApp Status, the world’s largest stories product with 1.5 billion users (primarily used outside of North America and Western Europe). One of the key innovations I spearheaded was Private Mentions, which addressed user needs for content relevance and feedback. This feature provides a lightweight way for users to directly indicate when a status is meant for specific contacts, while also giving the original poster valuable feedback when their status is reshared.

Details are restricted as some of this work is under NDA. However, you will find high-level project highlights below. Please feel free to contact me for additional information.

Success Metrics:
• ~20% of mentioned statuses are reshared and is seeing steady growth
• contributed +1 million posts/day
• poster WAU win of 425.0K
• daily posts (+0.07%), and bi-directional interactions (+0.14%)
• Total message sends saw an increase (+0.02%) as a direct result of Private Mentions as a mentioned post sends chat messages to those users who are mentioned.

In the News:

WhatsApp to soon allow users to privately mention contacts in Status Updates - Times of India

WhatsApp Introduces Status Likes, Private Mentions - The Guardian Nigeria News

WhatsApp Testing Status Update Mentions - The Peninsula Qatar

Tl;dr - the video below shares the full experience of Private Mentions.

Status Mentioned-Viewer Experience

The status mentioned-viewer experience refers to the experience of a user who has been mentioned in a status, and their consumption experience.

This project demanded meticulous design craftsmanship, balancing privacy, user experience, and brand identity. WhatsApp’s bi-directional contact model added complexity, requiring careful consideration of edge cases like blocked contacts, non-contacts, and mutual contacts. Every interaction had to align with WhatsApp’s core values—ensuring privacy while maintaining a sense of familiarity and fun. Private Mentions, in particular, was designed to foster genuine connections among close friends and family without compromising on the app's trusted, private nature.

For the viewer experience, users needed to know they were mentioned and have the ability to reshare to their own status. This was achieved through notifications, the chat thread, and the Status viewer. For the chat experience, I explored new chat components and designed one that could scale to multiple status events within chat. Additionally, I worked on a separate project around Attributions—the subtext at the top to provide viewers with more context on a Status—which was incorporated into the Reshares project.

Poster Experience

Private Mentions is a bi-directional experience. Meaning, what one user-type does affects another. In this case, I designed both the mentioned-user experience, poster experience, and the reshared status audience’s viewing experience. For the Poster Experience, I explored numerous interaction options before ultimately choosing the direction that used as many existing patterns as possible to keep the experience familiar to users.

The poster experience is an important piece of the Status flywheel as posting is an input into views, and views often spark conversations. Private Mentions not only increase views, but it pulls at the mimicry lever by encouraging mentioned users to reshare to their own status.