How To Improve Google Hangouts

How would you improve Google Hangouts?
Before jumping in, I want to clarify everything that Google Hangouts does. It:

• helps you text, call or video chat with people on the desktop and on mobile app
• lets you send emojis and pictures
• maintains a contact list of all your GMail contacts
• lets you save favorite contacts
• lets you group chat

It looks like Google Hangouts has a pretty exhaustive list of features already built out. I think it might help to identify for who we want to improve Hangouts -- we can figure out more features from there.

For who do you want to improve Hangouts?

Let's look at a few different groups. At a high-level, we can look at either the Consumer or Business markets.

For Consumers, we can look at how to improve this product for:

• Families
• Friends
• connecting with friends of friends

For Businesses, we can improve Hangouts for:

• Salespeople - as a salesperson, I need a chat application that better organizes all my sales leads
• Office Operators - as an operator, I need a chat application that helps me communicate needed improvements so that the company can run more efficiently
• Other white collar workers
• Developers
• Researchers
• Marketers
• etc.

So, with that said, we need to figure out:  What market should we focus on? Which is to say, what metrics are we looking to improve here?

Let's say, we want to improve the Consumer market. We're concerned with Retention. We know a lot of people have downloaded Hangouts, but they choose to chat with their family & friends on other platforms. We want them to keep coming back on a daily basis. 

Great. So, let's go with the Consumer market and see what we can do to get more people chatting on a daily basis.

Let me go back to the basics to think if there are any areas of overlap between these different consumer personas:

• As a family member, I want a place to store notes and documents so that I can easily reference them later on to another family member.
• As a friend, I want to know details about my friend when needed so that I can reconnect with them online or in real life seamlessly.
• As a friend who wants to connect with more friends, I want to know who's contact I don't have so that I can reach them when needed.

So there doesn't seem to be any particular overlap between groups - for a way to increase retention across the board for consumers. Let's further whittle down the consumer market to one of these personas.

I think if we are interested in Hangouts retention, let's go for the big kahuna -- let's figure out a way to increase retention for you and your friends.

Sounds good.

Give me a moment. (writing)

1. Events Amplifier & AI Bot:  A tool to let friends know an event you're hosting in an non-intrusive way. This might help create a group chat to help sort out details. Moreover, you could attach a chat bot in this chat, so when someone is looking for information like -- address, time and date, or even your apartment number -- the person does not have to wait for you to respond; a bot could respond. 

By focusing on events as a focal point, other friends will probably come back to the group chat and chat more. Moreover, they might find it easy to share pictures and video with this auto-generated group chat. From there, people can share and find contacts with other folks in the group chat -- leading to more conversations in the future.

2. Photo stream:  Surprisingly, Hangouts does not hang onto photos or vidoes that are shared in the chat. Much like iMessage, Hangouts should copy this feature. Personally, I often find myself going back in to this iMessage page when looking for an important picture or maybe document a friend shared with me.

3. Profile Statuses 2.0:  To get friends to come back to Hangouts and spark conversations, Google could have profiles auto-magically show a stream of different activities you and I have taken -- what videos we've shared and watched on YouTube, or what articles we've read on Google News. We can even make this status only show articles or videos you and your friends have read or watched (not all articles). 

Okay, so what's your recommendation?

Well, I think the most interesting idea to implement that could drive real usage is the Events Amplifier & AI Bot.  

First, let's go into the reasons why I didn't choose the other two.  Profile Statuses 2.0 might be too much of an invasion of privacy leap for most users. Photo stream is definitely a me-too product; it won't catch many users' eyes. 

Events Amplifier & AI Bot is interesting. Despite the rise of Facebook, people still email each other about events that are happening -- effectively that is the group of people that should be included in a group chat. So, it should be an easy UX for new users to pick up. Second, it could be really useful for the person throwing the event -- which would again drive adoption. Third, I think friends would appreciate one centralized chat thread that holds all the info about the upcoming event and what has happened during the event. 

For all these reasons, Events Amplifier & AI Bot is the way to go.