Ill-designed Messenger desktop app obstructs casual communication

Photo by Anthony Wang

The Messenger desktop icon is a conspicuous symbol for its bad design.

I open my laptop to see that someone has sent me a message on Messenger. The Messenger desktop app doesn’t distinguish between urgent communications and mundane group chat updates in its notification symbol at the bottom of my screen, so I am forced to look at it. 

The message is a picture of a pork belly dish a friend has just made, cooked in a Chinese style, the name of which has slipped my mind. I click on the photo to see it better. Nope, time to Google its name. But when I press the buttons Alt and Tab on the keyboard to move to the browser, I get rebuked by the vengeful Messenger desktop app. 

“No! You cannot leave!” it shouts, having inexplicably opened a new window to display the zoomed in image instead of simply overlaying it on top of the original chat.

Fine! I close out of the image’s special window. My friend has just provided the name of the dish anyway. “Dongpo pork,” he writes. 

OK, I get it — it’s only 10 letters, so I could easily Google the name myself. But of course, being lazy (yet efficient!), I hover my mouse over the name of the dish and click three times in quick succession, an action that almost universally allows me to select an entire line, whether I want to cut out an entire paragraph in Google Docs or highlight a message on a webpage. And yet in the Messenger desktop app, deliberate design choices invalidate this feature. The third click cancels out the first two, so when I copy and paste into the Google Chrome search bar, I get nothing.

Exasperated, I Alt-Tab back to Messenger, but I am blocked by a persistent parasite, labeled with only the two words “Software Update,” suggesting that I “Update Messenger to version 162.0.0.8.220.” 

Of course, it has summoned a new window to carry out its diabolical task, so the original Messenger does not even appear. Hoping to return as quickly to my conversation as possible, I hastily click the massive blue button on the bottom right of the window, only to realize a split second later that I had once again missed the tiny text reading “Automatically download and install updates in the future,” clicking instead “Install Update.” But it’s too late; Messenger has closed, replaced with an inevitably deceitful progress bar on my screen. And I am left to ponder why I didn’t just insist on communicating through a different app.