iMessage Dynamic Typing Indicator

We’ve previously discussed how anxiety-inducing read receipts can be. It’s tough knowing when someone sees a message and chooses (or forgets) to respond, but there’s a totally new level of anxiety we have yet to explore: the typing indicator.

Whether it’s in Slack or iMessage, knowing someone is actively composing a new message is stressful. This is only made worse when you see someone continue to start and stop writing. Eventually, when they send a very short message, you know a lot of thought went into it.

Seeing a message is being composed provides one level of insight, but what if we took this one step further? In iMessage, you could update the typing indicator to reflect the length of the drafted message. This doesn’t add much true utility, but it would show you how far along someone is in writing a response.

Honk did something similar by showing a message being written in real-time, but obfuscating the actual message content reintroduces some anxiety into an already stressful experience.

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