One of the first major concepts I worked on at Yik Yak was identity.

The problem was twofold. First, users weren’t able to establish quality connections with other users beyond posting content to Yik Yak. Second, users were leaving our platform to continue conversations on other social platforms that had identity.

To the first problem, unless users identified themselves somehow in the content of a yak, there was no way to identify who the content was coming from. Hence the feed was just a crowd rather than a collection of familiar faces & voices. While this was precisely the intended functionality of Yik Yak in the early days, it wasn’t something that we felt would sustain as a social platform for the longterm. We wanted to be the app that you could open anywhere and immediately be plugged into the community around you.

The second part of the problem was users taking conversations that required some level of identity to other apps. We observed an interesting pattern in these scenarios. Users would often share handles from other social platforms in the yak thread. It would usually be framed as “have kik?'“ or “wanna snap?“ At that point we’d lost out on the conversation happening on Yik Yak.

Feedback from users wasn't great. Users needed too much context to understand what they were seeing and what was going on in this screen. The more we sat with this permutation of the feature, the more edge cases started to crop up.

• What happens if the yak that the conversation was initiated with no longer exists?
• If you started an anonymous conversation with a user before, would you see that conversation history in the thread?
• How does this help our current goal of increasing handle creation?

The more we unpacked this idea, the more complex it became. I took a stab at solving the second problem of conversation history in an anonymous chat. The way I set it up was if you had an existing conversation with an anonymous user, every time you initiated conversation with them from a different post, that yak would be appended to the conversation and act as a watermark for the change in context. Here’s a video walkthrough of the prototype for the proposed feature:

This was just a concept but it solved for the problem we identified which was retaining a conversation history with an anonymous user and signaling context switch in a conversation.

The one problem we weren't able to solve for was the biggest one: How will this significantly increase handle adoption? The answer was it wouldn't. If we allowed direct messaging with anonymous users, the value of claiming a handle would be diminished.

Our First Handle-Only Feature

In the end, the product decision was made to gate direct messaging behind handle adoption. In order to use chat, you needed to have posted with your handle turned on. The more we sat with it, the more it made sense. The more we tested it with users, the clearer it became that this was the right move. Users responded positively to having to share their handle in order to chat with someone. It made sense to them that a conversation on that intimate of a level would require some exchange of identity.

Launching the feature did yield a lift in handles claimed. Another benefit of the feature was it kept users in our app where before they may have left. They didn’t have to switch to a separate messaging app to have a private conversation anymore. The launch of Direct Messaging (Chat) was a hugely successful feature.