Typing...
Back in 1997, an IBM team was prototyping an early chat tool and ran into a problem that had nothing to do with code. People kept talking over each other, unsure if they got the message or if they were still there.
So they came up with a solution: a little indicator that shows when the other person is typing. They even patented it in 1999. AOL and Yahoo picked it up soon after.
Now it’s the three dots you stare at on your phone.
Why you can’t look away
Two things happen at once when those dots appear, and neither one is about the message itself.
The first is presence.
The dots don’t tell you what’s coming, or when, or whether it’s coming at all. They tell you someone is there, right now. And leaving mid-typing feels like walking away mid-sentence would feel in person. So you stay.
(I recently wrote about something similar when MSN Messenger let you show if you were online or not).
The second is the open loop it creates.
A “typing…” message opens something your brain won’t let close on its own. The same effect that a cliffhanger has (I wrote about why our brains can’t leave things open).
Except this loop is live. It’s happening on your screen right now, and it won’t resolve until someone hits send or until that person stops typing.
Nobody set out to design a feature that keeps you staring at the screen. It was supposed to answer a practical question: if someone is there or not.
And it still does exactly that. But… the experience of it changed our behavior.
Those three dots have done more for retention than any other word. Go figure.
Until the next scroll,
V
I just had to open this article because someone was “typing…” 🥹