Quick Chat

In online games, we worry a lot about network latency; but social latency can also be a problem. Social latency is the delay between one person communicating and another person responding to them. Voice chat has almost no social latency— one player speaks, the other hears them instantly, and can respond instantly without ever pressing a button. Text chat, less so. In the time it takes to type out a response on anything from a horizontal touchscreen keyboard to that worst of user experiences, manually entering characters with a controller, the conversation can go cold, the moment can be lost, and even your partner might ever wander away.

Rec Room had an existing Quick Chat system, but it was significantly flawed and under utilized. Using simple but effective adjustments, we increased Quick Chat message send by over 400%… and increased D7 retention on non-VR platforms by almost 4% as a result.

I only handled the system design; the Quick Chat UI was pre-existing.

Slow Chat - How Quick Chat used to function

In its original presentation, Quick Chat was hidden behind four icons just above the main chat entry window. Tapping these icons would open up a scrolling menu of 15-20 different pre-written messages, with little care given to aligning them in any way with their source icons.

For example, suppose you wanted to quickly say “Yes” or “No”. Your first assumption would be those would be located with the “Thumbs Up” and “Thumbs Down” icons, respectively. Not so here! With this layout, both “Yes” and “No” are located hitting the “Hi” button and scrolling all the way to the bottom.

It’s extremely difficult to produce a mental map of over 60 haphazard chat messages, and that’s only if you notice the little chat buttons in the first place. The mental load is too much for fast conversation.

Improved Quick Chat

The final design was simple, but extremely effective. The ~60 preset chat messages were simplified down to 20: 5 per category, selected for clarity, contrast, and utility. Each category now also has a clear function:

• “Hi” contains greetings and farewells.

• “Room” contains play-based phrases, like “Let’s party up!” or “Come with me.”

• “Thumbs Up” contains positive reactions.

• “Thumbs Down” holds negative reactions.

The Quick Chat menu also now defaults to open, which tremendously increased the discovery of the feature, and reduced the friction to use it.