The Story Behind WhatsApp's Swipe-To-Reply

Transcript

You’ve done this gesture thousands of times, and you probably don’t know how it came about.

Swipe-to-reply merges two older inventions into one move: replying to a specific message, and swiping a row to act on it.

The person behind it was Charlie Deets, an early designer on the WhatsApp team. In 2016, WhatsApp added quote-reply behind a long-press that few people found. In 2017, Deets turned it into a single swipe.

In his words: “At WhatsApp I worked on a feature called ‘swipe to reply’. This is a non-obvious interaction that allows you to swipe a message to reply to it. People found this feature faster than long-pressing a message and tapping reply. They naturally socialized how to perform the behavior in group chats and online posts.”

WhatsApp taught him that simplicity was everything: “It’s a chat app, you should be able to chat in it. Anything beyond that dilutes that useful interaction.”

So instead of a pop-up tutorial, WhatsApp added a one-time, self-dismissing toast for people who still replied the old way. “The idea was to give them feature awareness without interruption.”

Today the swipe is everywhere. Telegram added it in 2017, and Signal and Apple’s iMessage let you swipe a message to reply too.

The idea of answering one specific message goes back to Usenet, where people used a “>” to quote the line they were replying to. The thread itself came from the Palm Treo 600 in 2003, which grouped your texts with each contact into a single chat session.

Threads gave way to replies, replies became quote-reply, and now it all happens in one swipe.