2019/5: Some unsuccessful googling about read receipts
The first time I saw a chat using read receipts (those little indicators that tell you if the other person has read your message) was in Facebook’s Messenger. I still remember thinking: why would they do such a thing? Everyone is going to hate that feature!
Seven years later, they are everywhere.
The question of “why” remained with me, though. I was sure there was a lot to say about it: the thinking behind the feature, discussions about how it affects the UX, its social implications. Sadly, there isn’t as much information as I expected, or at least I didn’t find it. But I already did all that googling so I might as well share it. This is going to be just a collection of links and some comments about their content.
If you start searching for read receipts, the first thing you are going to get is a lot of articles written by people that hate them, and tips on how to circumvent them. You could take this as an indication of how they are a bad idea, but that’s not necessarily so. Maybe it’s just that you are more likely to write an article about a feature you despise than about some useful, unobtrusive new addition.
One of these hate pieces is Why I hate read receipts, a 2013 article from Ars Technica. I like it: they give a little of historical perspective, and then talk about the social dynamics that read receipts create. It also gives one of the two more repeated reasons for the feature: it makes you stay on the service longer. This is both because you are more likely to wait for a response if you saw that the other person read your message, and because you are more likely to keep chatting if the other person knows you have read their message.
The other reason given for the feature is that it makes chatting more similar to face-to-face conversations. This person argues from that perspective, and she goes further: having read notifications enabled makes you a better, more responsible grown-up. I don’t buy it: you can say anything you want, but you can’t argue with a negative social dynamic on the grounds of “you’ll be a better person if you overcome it”. At least not from an UX perspective.
There are different manifestations of read receipts. Apparently, Apple was one of the first companies to introduce them in a chat application. This stroke me as odd, given their focus on user privacy. But, apparently, they are optional and they are opt-in, not opt-out. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, on the other hand, don’t let you disable them. WhatsApp does, but they are opt-out: you have them enabled by default. Finally, WeChat doesn’t have read receipts and they consider it a feature.
This is a very nuanced take, specifically from the perspective of relationships. I can’t summarize it: it’s very good.
But relationships aren’t the only use case for chats. I found this analysis from a company that talks about the decision on adding them, and how to do it. The chat in question is meant to be used between businesses and customers, so the dynamic is very different to that of personal relationships. Weirdly enough, one of their conclusions is to enable read receipts for both sides, and not allowing anyone to disable them. I would say that giving a user the power to know if a business has seen their message, but at the same time allowing them to keep their privacy, would make sense in this context since there is already an asymmetry between the participants to begin with.
More on UX: an (unfortunately short) discussion in the UX Stack Exchange. The upvoted answer goes with the idea that it’s a very context-dependent decision: Tinder doesn’t have read receipts (nor timestamps, apparently) for a reason.
So far everything is either opinion or argumentation from common sense. The closest to “research” I found was this article. 108 people looks like a small sample to me, though, specially when they are all students from the same university. And the results just confirm what we already imagine.
Finally, a very interesting article that analyzes the need solved by read receipts, and how they also create a new dynamic that can be problematic on its own:
When an application that is supposed to bring people together and make it easier to communicate leads to us tiptoeing around our social interactions via the medium, it’s time to rethink what the app’s end goal is, and whether all of the features that have been built up to that end actually do support it.
On a personal note: I re-enabled my read receipts after writing this.