Messaging · UX case study · March 2026
A proposal to give Zoho’s Arattai a clear reason to exist: everyday communication for small businesses, and a way for people who aren’t on the app to reply without installing it.
Team of 4. I did the research, user personas, stakeholder mapping, ideation, user and task flows, and the UI.
Pitched as a Made in India WhatsApp alternative, Arattai passed 7.5 million downloads in early October 2025
Downloads fell sharply within a month, and active users stopped growing.
Sources: Deccan Herald, 5 Oct 2025; Storyboard18, citing Moneycontrol, 4 Nov 2025.
Where Arattai falls short
No strong “why”: lacks a clear value proposition beyond being a WhatsApp alternative, which is a weak reason to switch or stay.
Features like Pocket and mentions are hard to locate.
Feature misalignment: features like Meetings exist, but don’t clearly match user needs or feel essential.
No established network, leading to drop-offs even after downloading.
Generic visual identity: feels too similar to WhatsApp, lacks distinct personality or emotional pull.Arattai needed a real reason to exist next to WhatsApp, and it kept losing people the moment they couldn’t reach someone not yet on the app.
We designed one fix for each.
Where Arattai sits
Turn any message into a task with an owner and a due date.
Each chat gets a daily recap of what’s still pending.
Approve requests right inside the conversation.
All without leaving the chat.
Cliq is Zoho’s Slack-style chat that companies set up for their staff. The people we designed for (shop owners, small agencies, freelancers and their clients) will never set that up; they already run their work on WhatsApp. Arattai has the consumer reach to win them, without competing with Cliq for the offices that use it.
Arattai’s selling point is privacy, and SMS links are a common phishing route in India. A guest link has to be safe and look safe. These are proposals I haven’t designed screens for yet.
The complete design process
Where could Arattai actually win, and what do people struggle with in the apps they already use?
Market scan
The casual texting space is already dominated by a wide range of apps. Competing head-on wasn’t realistic, so I looked for sectors Arattai could own instead.
I mapped other sectors we could target and circled three with the clearest need for fast but structured communication:
Secondary research
Articles explained why neither WhatsApp nor Teams can support fast-paced official communication, which validated our market scope.
Finding the gap
Primary research
To find out the exact problems, behaviours and touchpoints with current apps, I ran in-depth interviews. A few of the questions I asked:
Can you walk me through a recent conversation where a lot was happening at once?
When you receive something important on chat, what do you usually do with it?
Can you tell me about a time you accidentally forgot or missed something that came through chat?
What we heard
“WhatsApp has its setbacks, but it’s a lot faster.”
We identified two tasks users engage with most often and made them central to the experience, so the product prioritises speed, clarity and ease of access where it matters most.
Send messages that can be instantly converted into actions, and clearly signal urgency, ownership and expected outcomes.
A central space for tasks, documents and media from your chats, so everything is easy to revisit, organise and update without scrolling back.
From insight to rule
We turned the insights into a few principles: broad enough to leave room for ideas, specific enough to judge them against.
People already run their work through chat. Let them act on a message where it lands, not in a separate tool.
Any message should be able to become something owned, dated and trackable, in a single step.
Follow-ups, reminders and status should be carried by the system, not by memory or awkward nudges.
Important information should be visible at a glance, without adding more notifications to the pile.
Structure should never cost more than a tap. If it slows down a quick reply, it isn’t worth it.
Stars, screenshots and self-chats are signals of need. Design with those behaviours, not against them.
The app is only useful if your contacts can take part. Make joining the network effortless.
Arattai should have an identity of its own, not read as a WhatsApp clone.
Defining why Arattai exists by aligning user needs with business objectives.
Who we designed for
I built two personas from the work sectors we targeted: a founder and a product analyst.
Founder, 25-person digital marketing agency, Pune
Product Analyst juggling Teams, WhatsApp and Slack
Mapping value
We mapped our customers’ jobs, pains and gains against the products, pain relievers and gain creators Arattai could offer.
Tap an image to open it full size.
Assessing Arattai’s features against user needs and business goals, spotting gaps and misalignments.
Generating & sorting ideas
Substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate and reverse: applied to Arattai’s existing features.
Every idea plotted by impact against effort, separating quick wins and big bets from money pits.
Competitive check
We compared our proposed features against what WhatsApp, Teams and Slack already ship.
| Feature | Arattai (proposed) | Teams | Slack | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decision-centric communication | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| One-view priority dashboard | ✓ | ✕ | Limited | Limited |
| Reply without opening the chat | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Built-in smart summaries | ✓ | Limited | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cross-content decision visibility | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | Limited |
| In-chat profession indicator | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Tasks and reminders from messages | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Search voice notes | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
Arattai column = our proposal, not shipped features. Competitor columns corrected for features they already have: WhatsApp’s notification replies and AI message summaries (rolled out from June 2025), and task and reminder tools in Teams and Slack. WhatsApp also already has voice-note playback speed and disappearing messages, so ideas 05 and 07 below are about keeping up, not standing apart.
We asked about 7 people to vote on the features and shortlisted the ones with the most votes.
What made the cut
Each shortlisted idea was sketched as a quick flow. How I’d measure whether they work is at the end.
Convert a message into a task and act on it from the notification. Once accepted, it lands in your to-do list and the sender is notified.
Ask questions or respond directly on an assigned task.
Play voice notes at different speeds.
Swipe right to send a message to Personal Notes; tick the box to make it a task.
Group chats can auto-delete messages, or the whole chat, after a set time.
Flag a message as important before sending it.
See the role and position of the person you’re texting.
A daily summary of pending, completed and awaiting-response tasks.
A person who isn’t on Arattai gets a link to a temporary view of the chat in their browser, with a clear call to join.
What didn’t make it
These sat in the quick-win corner of the impact-effort matrix, but didn’t make the shortlist.
Defining how users navigate Arattai, and how its features are organised for a smooth, intuitive flow.
Step by step
I mapped how people receive and send messages, tasks and notes, including every decision point.
Hierarchy
We mapped the new hierarchy of information to simplify a complex system and make the user journey easy to visualise in the wireframes.
Defining placement, hierarchy and interaction of interface elements, so users can complete tasks efficiently.
Wireframes
Annotated wireframes of the key screens, showing where each new feature lives before any visual design.
Defining Arattai’s visual language through colour, typography, icons and styling, for a clear, cohesive and trustworthy experience.
Visual language
High fidelity
I designed the UI. The screens behind the two solutions are shown above; these are the rest of the product.
Success metrics
We started from drop-offs, so these track whether people come, act and stay.
Reflection