Finished writing the blog post about read receipts today.
"Read Receipts Considered Harmful"
https://asininetech.com/2018/03/19/read-receipts-considered-harmful/
@staticsafe Nice post! (One minor typo if you want to bother with it: "distracted by something else before they could response" should say "respond".) I was nodding along until "Say no to the double checkmark," which I think is interesting. Is that the UI folks are using for read receipts? Signal shows a double checkmark, but it only indicates that the message reached the recipient's device, which I find very useful--then I know they can't possibly have seen it because their device is offline.
@jamey fixed the typo, thanks!
As for the UI question, it appears I was operating from a slight misconception, in Whatsapp a double checkmark indicates that the message was sent and delivered, a *blue* double checkmark indicates that the message was read.
iMessage eschews icon indicators entirely and uses the text "Delivered" and "Read". The latter never appearing if the recipient does not have read receipts turned on.
@staticsafe I'm always fascinated by these kinds of subtle UX things, and I use very few chat apps, so this was all very interesting to me. Thanks for writing it up!