product designer

Cloud City Labs

Tackling the beast no one wants to

My Role

On a day-to day basis, I spent my time conducting user research, wireframing the application structure and it's interactions, building interactive prototypes and contributing to the visual design where necessary.

This video contains samples of the UI design and interaction work outlining primary and unique features we concepted.

Situation

E-mail is still the thorn in everyone's side. It's continually rumored to be as dead, but new clients seem to launch every week with slight variations on the theme. Upon replacing the physical form of an inter-office messaging system, it has seen very little innovation to the platform (though it's not for lack of trying).

The technology isn't built on ideas of the modern web. Products like Slack and HipChat are said to be eating its proverbial lunch, but in reality most of these are two-way messaging on steroids. Admirably Slack has brought a cheery, usable nature to messaging that is unique with some add-ons that make it formidable, but alas clunky. What most messaging tools have going for them is that they leverage the modernity of software and web development while email is stuck listening to 8-tracks.

The founders of Cloud City Labs and Echo thought the time was ripe for evolving the experience of email. Thinking beyond managing your inbox, after 30+ years of just sending text and images across the web, how could we actually invision our most common and ubiquitous tool as the comeback kid of the 21st century?

Results

We built out a working prototype including a variety of the features shown above and below. Our goal was to build enough a compelling alpha level product that we could pitch to investors

Alas, Echo failed to gain traction with investors and was shut down in September 2015

More work will appear here soon or available upon request

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Various Echo visual work
Some brief views of other deliverables