When I first saw the iPhone's message composer, on a friend's device, I was working on the design of a similar feature, and a detail struck me: the message bubbles on the left side of the screen were horizontally aligned with (and exactly as wide as) the input field at the bottom.
I said to myself: "What a smart and simple way to indicate the origin of messages!". The bubbles on the left obviously were the messages sent by me to Maria, and the ones on the right were the ones received from her. The alignment trick made it useless to indicate explicitly the sender name for every message. The visual association was the information.
Many months later, I realized it was not working this way. The observation I was so excited about was just a coincidence. I was disappointed. How could Apple get that close to such a nice concept by accident, and not take advantage of it?
By studying more carefully their design, I found that:
- the width of the bubble varies so as to best fit the length of the contained message (a simple "Yes" is displayed in a very short bubble). Pure aesthetics consideration, it seems.
- the width of the input field varies too, because it depends on the width of the "Send" button that itself depends on the language of the interface. In French, it's "Envoyer", wider than "Send".
- if it took me such a long time to realize that my beloved design feature actually didn't exist, it proves that having it or not didn't make a big difference to me.
More importantly: who cares who sent what?
Think about it: if I am Fabrice the user (rather than Fabrice the designer), who wrote what is supposed to be obvious to me because I know the history, the context of what happened.
Designers sometimes make wrong assumptions about what's necessary in the real life, because they fail to be the people. In the screenshots above, you have no way to know whether I'm the author of the messages in green or those in grey. But that's fine, because that's my conversation, not yours. So as long as I know, that's okay.
See also: iPhone Message Composer (Episode 1) in this blog