Honkish
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.
honkish
hɒŋkɪʃ]
adjective
Of or relating to the design philosophy of Honk, a messaging app known for its playfulness, experimentation, and delight.
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
Making presence feel real
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.
Icebreakers offered hundreds of questions designed to keep conversations moving and mentally stimulating.
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.
Messaging as play
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.
This approach to reactions led users to discover ‘emoji battles’, a spontaneous game hidden as a fun easter egg. If both people sent emojis at the same time, the emojis collided on-screen, driven by a tiny physics engine we built. Friends intentionally caused these collisions, transforming reactions into something totally different.
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.
Leaning into play made Honk unpredictable in the best way. It encouraged discovery, surprise, and plenty of chaotic-good moments. Not everything needed a purpose. Sometimes, the fun was in just seeing what would happen.
Little big details
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.
© Seb McLauchlan, All Rights Reserved
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.
Honk Sounds
© Avara, All Rights Reserved
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.
Embracing honkishness
In the end, Honk felt as much like a toy as it did a utility. Every action was tactically satisfying, visually rewarding, and encouraged experimentation.
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.
Footnotes
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I have my own thoughts on why Honk didn’t ultimately succeed — real-time-only messaging was impractical, we lacked group chats or an Android app, etc. With that said, any founder who’s built in consumer social will tell you it’s a brutal space, and lasting success is generally a black swan event. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, but it’s also important to know when to stop. I’m glad we knew when to shift gears. ↩
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Putting this together after Honk had already been sunset was fairly tedious, especially when it came to pulling together high-quality videos of the app. I strongly recommend documenting things thoroughly while they’re still alive, so you don’t end up wishing you had when they’re gone. ↩
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From day one, Honk was fairly divisive among tech and design folks — some saw its playful interactions as a waste of time, while others loved them. Both takes are valid. The product had its shortcomings, but there was also plenty to love, which is why I think it’s worth revisiting some of the details that made it special. ↩
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To this day, I still get messages from former users who met their best friend or partner through Honk, or who hope the app will be revived someday. Those messages remind me that even “failed” products can still be a success in their own way. (Or is that just me coping? Perhaps a mix of both.) ↩