Honkish

23 May, 2025

Before pivoting to build Family, I worked with many of
the same talented people on Honk, a real-time messaging
app. We discontinued Honk when we shifted our focus to Family, and when we
were eventually acquired, the Honk IP was transferred over along with everything else.

This post isn’t a deep dive into why Honk itself didn’t last¹ — many ambitious apps never find product-market fit, and Honk was (unfortunately) no exception. Instead, I want to highlight the small interactions, playful details, and random experiments that made Honk feel uniquely ‘honkish’².

Consider it a little love letter to the first app I ever created.

Most messaging apps follow a predictable rhythm: you type, send, and wait. Messages stack neatly over time, building an ever-growing conversation. It’s practical and effective, but also pretty boring.

Honk took a completely different approach. It had two chat bubbles, no send button, no chat history, and no drafts.

Each character appeared instantly on your friend’s screen — every typo, hesitation, and edit unfolding live.

When you wanted to say something else, you just tapped to clear the screen, like wiping a whiteboard clean.

Some found Honk overwhelming; others found it liberating. Either way, it made an impression.³

Chat interfaces typically feel pretty static. Messages rarely move beyond scrolling upwards, and aside from simple read receipts or typing indicators, there’s usually no indication of whether your friend is actively present in the chat with you or not.

In contrast, Honk continuously explored how presence was displayed, shaping many
of our design decisions.

When your friend entered a chat, a border around their avatar filled up to announce their arrival along with a sound.

When they left, a contextual burst of waving emojis appeared briefly as a goodbye along with a sound effect. These visual and audible details made your friend’s presence feel more tangible and meaningful, creating a kind of ‘snap-to-attention’ effect.

As you typed, your chat bubble dynamically resized; when you paused, it shrank back down. If both people typed simultaneously, the screen dynamically split 50/50, mirroring the natural back-and-forth of a real conversation.

If your friend looked elsewhere in the app, their avatar became a dashed outline, signalling partial attention without being fully present.

Presence also extended beyond simple typing into features like reactions. Double-tapping a friend’s chat bubble placed a heart exactly where you tapped, along with a faint animated circle and a simultaneous haptic felt by both users. This visually (and physically) pinpointed precisely what you were reacting to and when, creating the sense of a truly shared space.

Like many Honk interactions, the double-tap reaction emoji itself was customisable, with a little testing tray included.

As Honk grew, we continued expanding its feature set with presence top of mind, including a set of mini games.

Trivia was fast and competitive, designed as a best-of-five to keep things quick and engaging.

Tic-Tac-Toe felt familiar but became more entertaining with its instant play-by-play results.

True or False was straightforward multiple-choice, but immediate feedback made the game feel lively.

Four-in-a-Row clearly highlighted winning moves by placing the Honk face logo in the winning row and dropping an emoji crown onto the winner’s avatar.

Rock-Paper-Scissors leveraged matching emojis to indicate each round’s winner, using collisions to make outcomes clear and satisfying.

Every real-time game required both users to be fully present — if one person left, the game was paused, reinforcing the need for active engagement.

Designing every feature around presence was both rewarding and tricky. It forced us to rethink what a messaging app could be, but that challenge is ultimately what made Honk feel alive and unique.

Honk was designed as much for play as it was for conversation. Every interaction was an experiment in creating something engaging — both for users and our team.

The Honk button itself turned standard notifications into fun moments. You “honked” friends by sending bursts of emojis or stickers toward their avatar, accompanied by matching sounds.

Rapid tapping quickly filled the screen with delightful chaos.

Users could even customise their Honk buttons, reflecting their personality and preferences.

Clearing a message was one of my favourite little moments. As you typed, a tiny trash can at the bottom slowly filled, shaking when the chat bubble was full, and emptying when cleared.

Similar to our approach for double-tap reactions, emojis weren’t static symbols that were simply added into messages. Instead, they flew across the screen in real-time. Users could send (or more commonly spam) as many emojis as they wanted, in any order, even if this made the conversation briefly unreadable for both people.

Magic Words let users further personalise their chats by configuring words or
phrases to trigger mini emoji bursts that animated in place when (and also
where) typed. “Thankssss” might trigger smiley heart faces, like in the example below. In practice,
friends customised these for personal inside jokes, creating their own
individual experience for each chat.

I’m a believer that great software is defined by the sum of all its thoughtful small details, and Honk had quite a few that deserve an honourable mention here.

In-app notifications had animated borders visibly counting down how long they’d stay visible, clearly showing urgency when your friend was actively trying to get your attention.

We used background tray colours to subtly reinforce the meaning behind actions. Destructive actions, like deleting your account, turned the background red, emphasising the seriousness of the action.

This colour coding extended throughout the app, such as into chat themes.

For all of our emphasis on real-time interaction, several details actually created deliberate pauses or moments of friction — creating a contrast between the immediacy within chats and the slower-paced moments outside of them.

For example, finding new people was full of anticipation. I’m Feeling Lucky animated like a slot machine, making discovering new friends just a little more exciting.

Top Picks cycled through a series of icons before suggesting
new friends in a card stack.

Before chatting with strangers, we had users sign their names directly onscreen. It wasn’t legally binding, but this gesture noticeably reduced bad behaviour in random chats by making users pause and adding a sense of personal accountability.

When matching users to each other through our Find feature, a star field animation played in the background to represent a universe of people out there to find. Tapping the button sped up the star field, smoothly transitioning into a slideshow of someone’s profile when a match was found.

After conversations with strangers, users rated their experience using a slider shaped like the Honk logo, whose facial expression animated based on your feedback, making ratings tactile and expressive.

Honk was also where we first began to explore fluid transitions, whether it was editing pronouns or ending a conversation after meeting someone. This principle was heavily expanded on when we started working on Family, which I talk about here.

One defining detail was our custom typeface. Early on, we realised that creating the exact look we wanted required the perfect font, so we collaborated with Seb McLauchlan to design two bespoke typefaces: Honk Sans for the app’s UI, and Honk Chat, exclusively for the two message bubbles. These fonts gave Honk a personality you couldn’t find anywhere else.

Sound design also ended up becoming a significant part of the overall Honk experience, from the Honk sound itself, which went through countless iterations, to details like the typing sounds. We collaborated with Ethan Mueller to craft custom sounds used across the app, often designing a feature first and then having Ethan compose audio to precisely match the timing of each interaction.

Building Honk as a team felt a lot like using the app itself — constantly playing, experimenting, and discovering unexpected results. The more we leaned into that mindset, the more we uncovered ways to make routine actions feel unique.

These little touches weren’t strictly necessary, but they made the simplest
moments enjoyable.

Honk never reached mainstream success, but the people who loved it really loved it.⁴ It resonated because it felt human and expressive in ways traditional messaging rarely is. Before it was sunset, Honk facilitated over 2.6 billion characters typed, 170 million Honks sent, and hundreds of millions of images, audio, and videos exchanged.

Today, whenever I see apps crafted with thoughtful micro-interactions, playful animations, or unexpected surprises, I’m reminded of Honk and my continued desire for more interfaces that take having fun seriously.

Honk itself might be gone, but ‘honkish’ design — software that embraces playfulness, experimentation, and delight — will hopefully continue.