Hello! Scheduled messages is a feature that we’ve received a lot of requests for and the design team has been working on solutions that we’d like to share out in the open. If you’re interested in this feature, we’d love your feedback. Below is a quick summary of the feature. We’re also working on a more in-depth UX specification here if you want to get in to the details.
Send a message for a later time/date
The first noticeable change you’ll see in the proposed design is the send button will be a new segmented control that gives users the ability to open a new ‘Schedule message’ menu to choose preset scheduled times or to select a custom time to send the message.
When this menu is engaged, the menu will focus on the first item (Tomorrow at 9:00 AM) by default and a quick ‘ENTER’ on the keyboard will schedule it. UP and DOWN on the keyboard will also navigate through the options in the menu, while ESC will close it.
Users can choose a custom date and time through the Schedule message dialog.
All scheduled messages will then be accessible through the existing ‘Drafts’ view with identifying labels for scheduled messages along with the date/time they will be sent. From here, users will be able to change the schedule, edit the message content, or delete the message
Thanks @BeenJammin, I’m really glad you see the value in the feature proposal. I’d be curious to hear more about the use cases you imagine using scheduled messages for. Are there specific scenarios where you often need this solution?
I just work later than most of my team, so I’d really like the ability to send something to the group, but not ping everyone when they are all off work. I don’t need anything fancy really, just a scheduled send that gets to everyone the next day when they are back at work.
The feature would be very useful in our NGO as we have teams in different countries and time zones. Scheduling would be very useful to send a message to a team (or a colleague) in a different timezone so that they receive it in the beginning of their day (sometimes better than during the night).
It’s also useful when you have an idea to send to your team or colleagues but it’s completely outside working hours or days. Like you remember something to share with your team during the weekend, but it’s not so urgent to send it immediately. You can schedule it in Mattermost and you know it will pop up on Monday 9:00 am so it’s not lost!
Many thanks anyway for making this idea closer to reality!
Thanks for the feedback @emmanuelix. This is very helpful in validating the problems we’re aiming to solve here. I’m glad that the proposed solution resonates with you and how you work with your team. The use cases you’ve described make perfect sense and have been shared by other customers/community members as well.
We use Mattermost in a mainly voluntary organization. This means that our users use Mattermost at different times of the day and night. Depending on what suits them best in their private lives.
For some people, this means that they cannot maintain a healthy emotional distance from the project. And want to react “quickly” late at night to “the one message” they have just received.
The function for sending later would take the pressure off many people. On the one hand, because others don’t notice the times at which they are working. And secondly, because you can then consciously plan messages on Monday morning.
Why is this not implemented over a year later? For worldwide Communities with members in all time zones, this is needed. I view this as a miss on a basic feature. Phone chat apps have had this for over a decade so its not a new concept in the least. Design wise, fine. just launch something for the good of your users.
This is a killer feature of Slack, and I lament that mattermost doesn’t have it.
Use case 1: As a user, I want to send a message to another user who may no longer be on the clock, so I want to schedule a message to arrive near the start of their day. This is especially important as I know that they may sometimes check mattermost after hours on their phone, and don’t want them to interpret the message as time sensitive.
Use case 2: I want to send myself a reminder in a day, or a week to check on something, or bring up a topic in a meeting, or otherwise leverage the fact that I can send direct messages to myself, and incoming messages use the notification system to function as a reminder. In this way I don’t have to use another app to create a reminder.
Feature Creep suggestion: Allow me to forward a message and schedule a delivery time for that forward.
Been looking forward to this for about five, maybe six years now. This is great news. Another feature to bring this closer to parity of what one would expect by default.
We would absolutely love to see this feature added, we used it in Slack quite often. I have several teams that have people working at all hours, weekdays and weekdays, etc, and not everyone mites their phones at night so the ability to schedule and not worry about annoying them is very useful.
Here I am wondering the same; I went to message someone and thought, now hold on…this needs to be a feature. iOS just got it recently, so it should come as no surprise that this may likely be long over due! Looking forward to this, I suppose I’ll just leave the message typed out for in the morning to hit send. LOL
I tried this based on a quick google result and was really disappointed to see it wasn’t already implemented! I’m often traveling to different timezones from my team, and absolutely need this feature, exactly as you have it laid out here.
