Read Receipts in Instant Messenger

There are some instant messenger applications have read receipts. However, lots of users complain about this feature because this is causing so many concerns and troubles in their user experience.

"read" is shown with the time of the receiver reading the message

The read receipts feature shows the time of the user reading messages to the people who chat with the user. As a user of the Facebook messenger app, I think the time of reading messages is something private and I am not willing to be known by other people. And the worst thing is, in Facebook's messenger app, this feature cannot be turned off.

This feature makes chatting online more similar to chatting in reality but it is a worse experience online than in reality. It is more similar because in conversation in reality, people acknowledge when other people receive their information. However, with this feature, knowing the time the receiver read the message is the only thing they have and things such as receiver's facial expression and reaction are missing, which could cause a huge misunderstanding between sender and receiver.

For a designer of an application, it is important to do research on what users really need before building anything. The designers of the read receipts in instant messenger obviously didn't do research on users' needs because there are lots of complaints from users, and even questions such as "Why? Why on earth would you voluntarily use Apple's read receipts?". Designers built this feature just because they want to. At the same time, when there is a new feature, leave the users a choice of not using the feature to test how users feel about it and it can also prevent users eventually choosing other apps over this one only because they do not like the new feature.

Citation:
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/08/turn-off-your-read-receipts-now-a-plea.html?mid=twitter_nymag