Will Whatsapp's blue ticks change user habits?

Silence is often the most eloquent reply. - Ali Ibn Abi Talib

Yesterday at around 5.30pm (EST) I was in a group chat with some friends and I noticed the tick marks next to my messages started going blue.

After a bit of Googling, I found that Whatsapp have rolled out a new featurethat notifies you not only when a message has been recieved by a device, but also when a message has been viewed by a user. In group chats, it tells you when all participants of the group have viewed your message.

The first question that came to my mind when I found this out was how will this effect my user experience? I took to twitter to see what other user thought of this change and found that opinions were mixed.

A common theme I found was people thinking that it may put a strain on their relationships as you now know when someone's ignoring you:

Others felt it's a trivial change that won't have a substantial effect on the overall experience:

And there were a few that felt it won't have any effect on the way people use the app:

I found myself inclined to agree with people that felt the new feature won't have too many adverse effects, and anyone that creates issues based on some blue ticks are clearly avoiding a bigger problem. After all, almost all chat applications (including Apple's own iMessage) have encorporated read notifications for some time now.

Next, I found myself wondering why this issue is so important to people? Will it really have any impact at all? Interestingly, I found that in recent years, traditional SMS has been overtaken by third party chat applications, and we're at a point now where it's almost essential to have one or more apps installed to keep in touch. The research company Informer found almost 19 billion messages were sent on chat apps in 2012, compared to 17.6 million texts. This shows that with the amount of time people like myself spend using apps like Whatsapp, subtle changes can have big implications.

I can't help but feel like the reaction this small feature has caused is exactly what Whatsapp hoped for. If people feel like they have to reply to a message straight away to avoid "blue ticking" someone, it will cause an increase in the amount of time and number of times the app is used. However the adverse effect of this situation could be that people start avoiding the app and let their messages build up before replying to them all at once when they have time.

I'm not sure this will change my own personal habits when using Whatsapp, but only time will tell. One feature I definitely would like to see in the future is the option to turn these notifications on and off to enable me to choose whether I send a read notification or not.

At the end of the day, I can't help but feel like technology is becoming very influencial in the art of conversation. Emotion is difficult to translate in to written words (or lack of them) and with the increasing popularity of chat applications, too much is left to interpretation. If you really want to make sure someone gets your message.... call them!