A simplified communication tool with room to grow
UX // UI Project
The task I was given
Chat there is a pretty linear expectation of what chat should be: Quick, effortless. When you think of you job, you instantly dread meetings and being informed and these types of tools are supposed to alleviate any pain that you might have.
What was the planing process like?
So one of my first lessons going into design was to NOT reinvent the wheel. When I got into the game, there wasn’t a totality in settled science, but going into 2021, there have been vast movement towards a more settled science of design patterns that you should be using and a chat app definitely falls in line with that because there is a very set expectation of how it performs, there are so many instances it occurs in our life that even the smallest change will be noticeable.
What was my production process like?
You could go through the gamut of demographics and the vast majority of the entire population, rich/poor gender/other gender of the globe and most of them willl have some pretty natural interactions with a chat form of some kind, text message being the most prevalent.
It really is such a brilliant pattern it hits my criteria of most helpful tools that can be most understood in the least amount of touchpoint or cues, visual or otherwise.
It really is brilliant when you break it down.
What did you deliver?
Receiving messages on one side and sending messages out on the other side. A keyboard that everyone who has ever even seen technology can understand and that’s pretty much it.
So then what is there really to work on? The first obvious is the established design system. And the second is the unique needs of a business in real estate and the various tiers and categories of interest.
“Screen Spec: Chat Archive Page, Chat Feed, 1-on-1 Chat Feed, Reply Interactions”
This is one of those projects where its one of the more fun features where its utility is across industries and its one of the few areas where you can really have a more fun, social experience just by the very nature of it, but its very much a settled science where the wheel is nearly as perfect as it can be for the purposes.
“I learned to not over design something and stress yourself out over ideas that didn’t make it to development”
— Learned in Hindsight