What is Whatsapp Chat lock?

WhatsApp recently launched a feature called chat locks.

It allows users to add a layer of fingerprint-based authentication when opening a particular chat.

Once locked, all notifications from that particular chat are blocked and fingerprint-based authentication will be needed to open the chat in the future.

What user problem is this addressing?

There are some use cases when you want to hand over your phone to someone. The following are some that come to mind:

1. You use the same phone for work and personal use and need to hand over the phone to a college for work purposes

2. When you want to show a friend/ partner/ family member something on your phone

3. Your phone is lying in an easy-to-see spot and you don't want people to accidentally read your messages

4. You want to prevent people with malicious intent to see your chats

In these types of situations, you might have sensitive content in your chats that you don't want the other person to see. Locking that particular chat will give you peace of mind while handing over your phone.

How does Whatsapp gain from this?

Since this feature is targeted toward people already heavily engaged with Whatsapp, it's not intended to drive customer acquisition.

Moreover, since this does not increase any kind of engagement from the user, it's not targeted to increase any engagement metrics.

This can be seen as more of a delightful feature that might be successful in building trust with a subsection of their customers for whom this is a big pain point.

My observations while using this feature (it's not for me)

1. Having to authenticate using my fingerprint every time I open the chat adds a lot of friction to the experience.

   In my particular case, I would want to use this occasionally only when I want to hand over my phone. But keep it disabled otherwise.

2. The process to enable and disable this feature on a chat is extremely tedious. You have to go through multiple menus /clicks to toggle this setting.

   For me, this makes the feature completely unusable since I don't want to go through this process twice (one time before handing over the phone to enable it and the other to disable it once the interaction is over) every time someone asks for my phone.

Who is it for then?

Based on the design decisions they have made I think it might be helpful for the following use case:

If you are using your phone as a personal as well as work phone and have sensitive chats with your co-workers which you don't want people outside the company to read.

In this situation, you wouldn't need to keep toggling the feature but only enable it once when you get back home. Moreover, when you are disabling/ enabling the feature, someone is not asking you for your phone so you are in a relaxed state of mind rather than in a hurry.