Hello fellow hunters,
About six months ago, we launched Espresso (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...) and received some great feedback from this community and from our beta users -- this inspired our new design.
We moved away from our multi-colored approach to a clean, black-and-white interface that helps people stay focused on Espresso’s primary purpose: simplified group chat that helps individuals and teams be much more productive.
If you are familiar with this space, you may ask: how does Espresso compare to Slack? We’ve focused on accessibility/openness in a way that enables many use cases where Slack is awkward -- we're looking forward to feedback from all of the product thinking product-hunters.
We think of Espresso as more Google Docs where Slack is more Microsoft Exchange. We are built to be mobile first, flat and open. You can add people directly from your contact list or via an invite link if you don’t have their phone number. For example, in a university setting, a professor can invite a classroom of 500 students into a discussion space -- instantly.
With Espresso we have worked hard to remove the friction that Slack introduces when creating a new team (we call it a space). So if you live within one Team, Slack is straightforward, but if you want to create different teams and have channels within those teams, Espresso is built for you. Spaces/Teams can be created in a more ad-hoc-erly way, each with their own #topics. You can easily work across organization or with vendors.
So today, we'd like to introduce you to our new and improved Espresso Messenger -- now available for iOS and Android (Web is beta and Mac desktop app to follow).
This is the first roll-out of the new interface. We look forward to your comments and thank you for your time!
@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.
Espresso Chat
Osaurus
Espresso Chat
Osaurus
Espresso Chat