We have all been there. While you’re halfway through writing some impassioned paragraph-length riff to a friend, or maybe a grocery list to your partner, boom: reality kicks in! The doorbell rings. The bus arrives. You feel a tap on your shoulder from a coworker. You turn off your phone, secure in the knowledge that you’ll remember to return to that line of thought later. But you don’t. That message rests in the text input field and goes unsaid — unthought of, even! buried under a mountain of newer, noisier notifications. It is the digital purgatory of our time.
The Green Badge of Memory
WhatsApp has at last decided to address this common brain fart. By rolling out the new “Drafts” filter, the app is functioning as an executive assistant for your social life. Here’s how it goes in the real world: In the past, if you’d typed out a message and not hit send on that bad boy, your text disappeared into the nether of your chat history. You’d have to remember exactly who you were chatting with and manually scroll back to unearth the text. Now, the interface explicitly aims to jog your memory. A bright, bold green ‘Draft’ label is automatically applied to any chat that contains text and hasn’t been sent. It’s there for everyone to see, and it screams out for attention.
Changing the Hierarchy
But a visual tag isn’t the only change; the app is reworking its entire sorting algorithm. Previously, your chat list was linear — the last message you received was always at the top. The new version breaks that process by bringing these drafts out of your inbox and placing them at the very top. What if you are going into a room and notice that the one thing you forgot to do before leaving is right there, floating at eye level for you? This is what WhatsApp is bitching out to users about. It puts unfinished business ahead of new noise.
Why This Matters for Non-Techies
That may seem quite subtle, but in the realm of User Interface (UI) design, it’s HUGE. It understands that today, human attention spans are shorter than ever. We’re constantly jacking into a news cycle, Gilead. Our short-term memory buffers are getting wiped throughout the day as we tap messages back and forth on Slack, like Mr Robot operating the delete key. WhatsApp is making it easier to remember conversations by treating drafts as a priority. It’s especially great for those of us “slow texters” who create messages in fits and starts rather than in a stream.
The Global Rollout
This isn’t a beta test for Silicon Valley elites. The update is rolling out worldwide right now across both the splintered Android ecosystem and the walled garden of iOS. If you don’t have access to it yet, check your app store. It’s a good reminder that the most consequential technological breakthroughs aren’t always in Artificial Intelligence or blockchain, but sometimes come from fixing mundane human errors we commit every day.
