Work done while employed by MFLUENT, LLC
Role: product design, prototyping, web development, branding
Tackling team communication
Opportunity
Relying on email for team communication is not a great experience. Most teams introduce additional technologies: personal messaging, chat rooms, IRC, forums, wikis, etc. These however come at the cost of information fragmentation. If we examine what each of these technologies offers through the lens of an organization we find that there is no perfect use case that can meet these needs. A modern team communication tool has to optimize for the different communication patterns instead of trying to broaden a particular one to meet all the communication needs of the organization.
Introduction
In my five year tenure at MFLUENT we spent considerable energy trying to improve email. It seems appropriate then that my final project ended up being an attempt to replace email altogether as a team communication tool. BriteIM predates Slack — the de facto choice for team communication today — and while there is a lot of overlap in features and design between the two products there are also some philosophical differences in the approach.
As part of a product management team, this was my first experience at the driving end of a project with multiple development teams involved. As the lead designer I was responsible for shaping the product, prototyping, documenting and helped keep the individual dev teams in sync and productive.
Lead by example
The core goal was to promote thoughtful discourse. I believed this is as much culture as it is choice of tool. The first message always sets the tone of the conversation. The default UI for the compose screen is large and invites the author to craft their message before starting a conversation. We call these topics and they're essentially public at the organization level and can function as both group chat as well as discussion threads.
Meet me at the water cooler
Real-time messaging is also undoubtedly an important communication channel especially for remote teams that don't get to interact in person. In addition to topics, we also added private messages which are one to one conversations. Private messages provide a familiar instant messaging experience:
Keep what is good from email and build on it
Focused topic-based conversation leads to useful and thoughtful conversation. The challenge is to avoid the inbox management problems we know too well from email. The solution was to provide a threading model that provides some context to a conversation and to make it easy and cheap (mentally) to get a conversation out of the inbox. The threading has a side effect of making conversations discoverable later while disturbing as few people as possible today.
Deleting a conversation will archive it until a new message is posted. Muting a conversation will keep it archived until someone explicitly mentions you. Pinning keeps a conversation above the fold in the inbox.
This model in conjunction with a powerful search system makes it easy to disconnect and not feel overwhelmed when you return.
Purposefully missing: unread counts, status and typing indicators.
On the go
The visual language and flow were shared by both the iOS and Android clients. The app made it easy to retrieve a file or find a specific message on the go via a universal search function, supported quick switching between teams and had thoughtful and granular notification settings.
The product is the ecosystem
Modern services have a lot of components. I designed and built the front-end to the web portal to handle signups, billing, team management and auditing.
Conclusion
A lot has changed since. Indeed, email is no longer the main team communication tool. Yet I feel like many of the original issues we tried to address remain unsolved. The pendulum swung too far towards synchronous communication channels like group chat. This leaves everyone feeling claustrophobic and does not promote thoughtful discourse. I believe whatever dethrones Slack will not be a messaging tool — at least by today's standards.