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Changing the conversation: How Apple could modernize iMessage to be more powerful and easy to use

Previews

At this year’s WWDC, Apple devoted a lot of onstage attention to a revamp of the Notes app in both iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. One of my favorite additions is inline web link previews. Just paste a URL, and Notes will turn the link into a preview bubble with a thumbnail for the page, as well as a title and description.

This got me thinking about the possibility of applying the same functionality to other apps. The most obvious place to start, in my opinion, is Messages. I’m constantly sending and receiving links through iMessage throughout the day, whether it’s to a web page, an image, or even just a tweet. Having to flip back and forth between Safari and Messages just to see what the link I’ve been sent is removes me from the conversation and slows down my workflow.

This problem has been partially solved by applications such as HipChat, which I’ve been using for years. Just paste in a link to a tweet, and you can read the tweet inline with the rest of the messages in the chat room. No need to click or tap on anything. After using HipChat, links in Messages feel like a step backwards. However, HipChat has its limits, both in terms of functionality and design, and I think that Messages on both iOS and OS X could take this concept of inline previews to the next level. Let’s take a closer look.

Links

The state of document and link previews in Messages today.

If you’re familiar with the Finder in OS X, you’ve likely used Quick Look before. Select just about any file and hit the space bar, and you’ll see a preview of it. Apple has integrated a feature by the same name into iOS, but its functionality is much more rudimentary, showing little more than the file name and application icon for a file sent across Messages. Right now, the only exceptions to this rule are when someone shares their location with you in Messages, or you receive a contact, both of which show detailed previews.

Click any mockup for a larger preview.

Applying this same basic principle to Messages has immediately obvious benefits. An inline website preview, image, or tweet informs you of what you’re going to see before you even tap the link, if you need to at all.

Going further, links to YouTube videos could show the video thumbnail as well as the video title inline. Even links to iTunes Store content could be enhanced, showing a thumbnail and title right in Messages, or the album art and a preview button for a song from Apple Music.

There are uses for these inline previews beyond entertainment, too. Want to invite someone to an event? Forget sending an email, just message them the invitation and they can accept without leaving the app. iWork and Microsoft Office documents could show document previews and filenames without tapping. Voice Memos could play right in your conversation, just like iMessage audio messages.

If you’ve ever tried to share a note from the Notes app with someone over iMessage, you’ll know that right now, the contents of your note just get dumped into one long, scrolling box of text, with questionable formatting. Notes with inline previews could show the title and first few lines, offering to expand out to the full, properly formatted version with a tap.

Often times I find myself wanting to share the current weather with someone over iMessage who doesn’t live nearby, but right now the only simple way to do that is to take a screenshot of your weather app and send it over. Inline weather previews would allow you to hit a simple share button in the Weather app and send what could almost be described as a little weather “widget” to someone else. Last, but not least, who couldn’t use a little motivation now and then? Sharing your Apple Watch’s activity rings with someone else might just provide you that little bit of motivation you need to fill your exercise ring… or you could just brag once you have.

One of the best parts of these inline previews is that they aren’t limited just to the Messages app. The same previews could work in other Apple apps like Mail and Notes, or even in third party apps that support document-style text input. A feature like this, while subtle in implementation, has the potential to save a significant amount of time and remove points of friction in anyone’s workflow.

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Comments

  1. chrisl84 - 9 years ago

    Agreed, definitely a welcomed Messages improvement.

  2. PhilBoogie - 9 years ago

    Very nice idea, fully agree. I think the ‘preview’ search engines gives is quite useless. That ought to be innovated as well, but alas.

  3. As if iMessage isn’t already user-friendly!
    want more improvement vs not user-friendly, totally different.

  4. kittykatta - 9 years ago

    How about “Digital Touch” Messages.

    It really doesn’t make sense that this is an “Apple Watch Only” feature when the watch has such a small user base and is probably the least enjoyable device to create drawings on.

    Bringing these hand drawn messages to iMessage would enable users to have a larger screen and would allow a “novelty” feature to flourish into something practical.

  5. Pat Man - 9 years ago

    And please support animated GIFs already… For gods sake, it’s 2015!!

    • Pat Man - 9 years ago

      Oops, cut that out…. I was thinking of WhatsApp… Sorry! :-/

    • Greg Kaplan (@kaplag) - 9 years ago

      yea, but I wish photos had the feature google has where you can actually create gifs.

      • gigglybeast - 9 years ago

        …and have the gifs that you store in Photos actually work in Photos, not just display as a still image.

  6. dcj001 - 9 years ago

    Michael. I have an app called Messages. What is iMessage that you refer to periodically

    • tmrjij718 - 9 years ago

      iMessage is the type of message you receive in the messages app. iMessages are only available for Apple devices. iMessage allows users to send texts, documents, photos, videos, contact information, and group messages over Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G or LTE to other iOS or OS X users, thus providing an alternative to standard SMS/MMS messaging for most users with devices running iOS 5 or later.

      • dcj001 - 9 years ago

        “iMessage is the type of message you receive in the messages app. iMessages are only available for Apple devices. iMessage allows users to send texts”

        Is iMessage a type of message, or is it an app, or both? If it’s a type of message, how does a type of message allow users to send texts… ?

        Your response makes no sense.

      • tmrjij718 - 9 years ago

        iMessage is the type of message. Completely separate from regular text messages. More info on the Apple website : https://www.apple.com/ios/messages/

      • jacosta45 - 9 years ago

        @dcj001, iMessage is a type of message that is sent using the Messages app. Only apple devices can send and receive iMessages. They are encrypted due to their exclusivity with apple products.

        Hope this clears up anything.

    • freshpressedguest - 9 years ago

      ‘iMessages’ as it’s used here is referring to the type of messages sent by Apple messaging on iOS and OS X.

      Somehow, I think you already knew what we’re all talking about.

      Oh, was it all a snarky semantics attempt? Yeah, we knew that was your game too. We’re waaaay ahead of you. Maybe go back to “iTouch” patrol and let us get high-concept over here.

  7. Tony Ward - 9 years ago

    Fantastic ideas all around!

  8. Greg Kaplan (@kaplag) - 9 years ago

    you should send in a developer feature request. These all seem like good ideas.

    • Evan - 9 years ago

      Agreed. Apple developers should be seeing this. It’s the perfect visual design and they would agree, they would just have to build it. Fantastic job here Michael, you got everything right. A true “Quick-Look” feature like this on the iPhone would be a much welcomed improvement and a huge leap in moving iOS to be functionally more like OSX.

      Bookmarked.

    • incredibilistic - 9 years ago

      These are awesome ideas but technically it’s already available. Apple just needs to extend the functionality a bit further.

      Contact and Map sharing already give you Quick Look-ish message bubbles, it’s just not available for anything else, which seems criminal because the ideas presented here are genius and so flippin’ simple it’s almost criminal Apple hasn’t thought of this themselves. But then again I’ve been thinking of a Low Power mode for years and figured it was only a matter of time. With iOS 9 Apple is finally making it happen.

      Here’s another thought: now that the Notes app allows finger doodles does Apple plan to introduce Digital Touch to something other than the Apple Watch? They could easily implement a Digital Touch screen within iMessage that gives you the same real estate as the Apple Watch. Not sure if it would detract or take away the allure of Digital Touch on the Apple Watch but it will definitely increase awareness and usage, even if only by a few percentage points.

  9. J.latham - 9 years ago

    Good ideas but why stop there? Add support for features like Markup and drawing like Mail and the new Notes.

  10. Fred Burns - 9 years ago

    Great recommendations. I completely agree. If Apple made their iMessage API open then developing could do most of these request easily.

  11. hayesunt - 9 years ago

    Really great idea. Love the mockups!

  12. uniszuurmond - 9 years ago

    As a software designer, one of the things I always do is reverse engineering. Taking a popular feature and then looking where it may also be beneficial. To use a really simple example, browser tabs are great, and soon everyone was screaming for finder tabs. So this article is right up my alley, it does what I do on a daily basis. I will not go into all the incredible things Apple could do if only they applied this mindset – you can work it out for yourself. Great one, Michael.

  13. irelandjnr - 9 years ago

    Releasing iMessage on Android would mean I could message anybody using iMessage. That’s all I want!

    • Evan - 9 years ago

      If Apple eventually builds more complex features like this into the app that don’t become standards across platforms, I think it’s a good bet that they would release Messages on other platforms.

    • epicflyingcat - 9 years ago

      Yes please! That would finally make SMS totally pointless.

  14. This is good, but there is a solution that I think would be better. EVERYONE should look at the following post that was made earlier this month on the idea of MessageKit:

    https://medium.com/@mg/there-s-a-chat-for-that-apple-s-biggest-platform-opportunity-yet-19d5b1870857

  15. Ari (@ArioYazdan) - 9 years ago

    I would like to see it on more platforms. Not everyone is using iOS and I find it inefficient to have multiple messaging services. I would like to have everything in one place.

  16. In the bad old days mobile carriers used SMS to generate profits and iMessages were a way to stick it to them. Today the carriers have completely reversed direction. Now almost everyone gets unlimited free SMS while data has been capped and prices raised. iMessages have lost their raison d’être. There’s another drawback. If you text someone they can reply by either text or phone. If, instead, you iMessage them, they’re forced to iMessage in return unless you specifically send your phone number in the message. After missing a few incoming messages and having no idea they couldn’t phone me I switched off iMessage completely.

  17. Joe Ho (@joeho) - 9 years ago

    what about integrate in to iTunes, so it will work in Windows as well?

  18. inthemorningg - 9 years ago

    Make it cross-platform or at least provide a web client. Since the working world uses mostly Windows machines, I end up sitting at my computer in front of a perfectly usable full size keyboard and dual monitors, picking up my mobile device to tap out messages and replies on a comparatively tiny screen and touch keyboard because of Apple’s BS walled garden. Ugh

  19. Apple should buy Telegram and integrate all it’s functions to iMessage. Even better, they should buy it and rename Telegram to iMessage keeping the Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry clients

  20. Every single idea sounds great, they are a welcomed improvement…

    But do you remember the old iChat?… Do you remember how ease and functional was to ‘share screen’ (with permission of course) from other users with .mac accounts?

    Have you ever tried ‘Screen Sharing’ with an iMessage/Face Time/Apple ID account?

    The phone chat sounds awful and you can’t control the mouse or keyboard from the other end… You can only ‘see’ what’s on the other screen and that’s it.

    At least that was my experience the only time I’ve tried it.

    I haven’t tried ‘Screen Sharing’ with other accounts like Gmail, Jabber, or Yahoo. I don’t know if they still work in iMessage like they used to work in iChat.

  21. Matt - 9 years ago

    Great ideas. The more Apple builds Messages up like this, the more it differentiates itself from SMS and also makes email less necessary for many things.

  22. Taking your app store link a step further, it would pull up the App Store page in Messages.

  23. Kim - 9 years ago

    Sure, but they would want to make it work over standard SMS and MMS as well for a seamless Apple-like experience. Would these enhancements be available across standard texting platforms when sending to a non iMessage account?

  24. Smigit - 9 years ago

    Wouldn’t this all fall apart as soon as Messages falls back to SMS or needs to communicate with a non Apple device? A large reason Messages works well is that it is transparent as to whether SMS or iMessage is being used. If you build features on top of iMessage that possibly won’t work with SMS, then iMessage loses a lot of its appeal as a simple service.

  25. Johnny Slapstick - 9 years ago

    The app has not been called iMessage for some time now.

  26. Tom Coomer (@tomcoomer) - 9 years ago

    Teek is an intelligent messaging app that predicts your next sentence. The more you use it, the more intelligent it becomes.

    https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/teek/id717742891?mt=8

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smudgeinc.teek

Author

Avatar for Michael Steeber Michael Steeber

Michael is a Creative Editor who covered Apple Retail and design on 9to5Mac. His stories highlighted the work of talented artists, designers, and customers through a unique lens of architecture, creativity, and community.

Contact Michael on Twitter to share Apple Retail, design, and history stories: @MichaelSteeber