Espresso Messenger — Productive Conversations Start Here

@jguedalia cool — what are some of the major changes you've made to the app (besides the visual appearance) in the last six months?

@chrismessina The first key thing we did was look for a balance between standard interactions and custom views. This might not at first blush seem very important or require any deep design creativity, but we feel it's a big deal. The reason for this is that although our first design had color and flair and basically the same information architecture, we had painted ourself into a corner so that interaction, UX and design were enmeshed. As a result whenever we got feedback that a certain flow was clumsy or confusing we would tug on a thread and whole sweater would unravel. So the balance you can see between things that look standard and the stuff that looks custom was a painstaking design decision. As an example, in our first iteration of this versions (espresso 2.0) the Space/Team creation would first have you invite people then name the space. We liked it based on some feed back and based on the symmetry with then adding #topics. So the flow was people --> space -->topic. After the first round of beta users we found that people would intuitively write the name of Space rather than choose people. Our balance of custom to standard let us flip to quite easily space name --> then people or topic Another (fairly standard) trick is choosing what lives in the the three dots. We've made at least four changes here based on user feed back and obviously there is little if any design-hacking needed to make that change. Then we aspire for extensibility and integration -- or an open design. For extensibility, you'll note that in a space view the hash-tag and people icons are left justified, that's because we intend to add more tabs and eventually have an API for users to add and remove tabs.  (see images added above) For integration we flattened out the back end to make espresso easy for ISVs and SIs to integrate (not sure we will take that path to market but again gives us flexibility) or more likely for us to integrate for value, in some verticals markets where we see early adopters (white space where slack is not dominant or dare I say relevant/appropriate) Lastly, even though the black and white design evokes simplicity and works with the name, it also gives us literally a tabla rasa. For example I label my spaces with emojis which look awesome on the plan background (we may add this as feature) but again we discover this because we created something flat and open. (see images added above) Would love to hear thoughts and similar experiences.

@jguedalia thanks for that comment. I agree with those decisions! Will have to take a look and see how these improvements feel!

@chrismessina Thanks Chris. Looking forward to your feed back.

@chrismessina @jguedalia Hi Chris, the app is finally running smoothly and picking up steam. Would love for you to check out the most recent version.