Introduction

It was quite a journey working on Swipe Business Messenger. A small team of bright individuals with a mission to help people (mostly freelancers) achieve work-life balance. With the increasing use of smartphones and instant messaging applications, the line between work and downtime becomes very blurry. Often times freelancers run into the problem of clients harassing them in their free time through instant messaging applications such as Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype etc.

My Role

I was tasked with all design related aspects of this project. From creating the company logo, to designing the website and creating the look and feel of the app. 

The Challenge

Designing an intuitive instant messaging application that makes it easy to separate business contacts from friends. 

The Process

As the only designer/design consultant, and with a blank slate, it was great being able to help envision how an app like this could help resolve a pain point of the target audience. 

My value proposition was to create an instant messaging app that has two separate profiles build into it.

Why was two separate profiles the solution?

• After conducting a survey with 500 freelancers, we learned that they needed a clear distinction between their social life and work life within instant messaging applications.

• Since the app was going to work with various existing instant messaging applications, the premise was to have an easy way of separating business contacts from friends.

• Having the user assign contacts to either the business profile or social profile makes the app more user friendly and clutter free.

Collecting Feedback

The core functionality of the app revolved around providing a clear distinction between business contacts and social contacts. With extensive controls regarding privacy settings. After wireframing the initial concept we reached out again to the 500 freelancers we had on file to collect feedback. I then reiterated the design based on the feedback we received. 

From the feedback we got, we learned that a clean minimal UI was highly appreciated, as it prevented users from feeling overwhelmed. Features should be easily accessible, but not in view at all times. The high fidelity prototype shown above was what the app would look like after implementing the feedback, and was eventually send out to the development team. 

The Outcome

With close to 4,000 pre-launch beta signups, it showed that there was a need for an app like this. It was a shame that the app never launched because of workload and responsibility issues within the founding team. Even more so since there was some great potential and interest from Google.