Tomaž Štolfa

The Notification is the Interface

2014-07-21T11:59:10-07:00

We have seen quite a few experiments geared towards using notifications and the notification centre as the main interface. Yo, Wut, Text are probably just the most eloquent examples of “notification only” services. Lightweight applications that allow you to compose or address a message on one end and just display a notification on the recipient’s device.

I’ve always been a big fan of minimal interfaces, and notifications as the interface are probably the ultimate frontier in terms of simplicity and surface size. They are consistent and constraining in design, but still very powerful.

Just (Another) View #

I like to think about notifications and the notification centre just as another view in the application with specific design constraints. When imagining your next product or refreshing your current one try to think about what is the most valuable minimal content you can display and the actions attached to that.

Zero Effort #

Lock screen notifications require next to zero effort to dismiss. Compare that to an email, an SMS or a Facebook notification. Those usually pile up and require you to open the application to consume the content and perform an action.

Policy and Control #

People using your app often can’t just decide to remove a view or two if they are not interested in that specific content. With notifications as the interface they actually have control over displaying notifications, sounds and device vibration. They can turn on “do not disturb” and the notifications will just wait there or disappear if not relevant anymore.

(Re) Engagement #

Notifications are great re-engagement tools. Something pops up on the screen, you tap it and voila, you are back in the app that you have been ignoring for the last month. When the notification becomes the interface the engagement model changes from entry point into an actionable item. That’s really powerful - specially when combined with deep-linking and background processes.

Quickly Actionable #

Notifications are getting more and more actionable. While enabling quick replies and multiple actions has long been possible on Android, iOS is catching up in the next release. You don’t need to open the application to reply, mark something as important or forward the item to everyone in your address-book. If I had to make a prediction, I think this part is going to be the most interesting in terms of innovation.

A few examples – Twitter could let you Favorite or Retweet a tweet straight from the notification. Spotify could enable you to [+] songs or playlists as your friends add them. Sunrise could let you say “I’m 5 min late!” to all the other participants of a meeting. And there are many more. All of this without ever opening the specific application.

That’s powerful.

Design everything.

2014-06-16T09:13:41-07:00

…design refers to the will to interpret the meaning of human life and existence through the process of making things.

– Kenya Hara

Design is something more and more people like to use to define something that looks pleasing to the eye. However design is much, much broader than that.

Every single thing we, as humans, create is designed.

Think about your coffee mug, your glass, the desk you might be sitting at, and the chair you are sitting on. Since all those objects are designed to be the way they are, the people making them had to make decisions during the creation process, that drastically influenced the final product. It is no different in software creation or any other process that ends up with a product.

Even simple plain text artefacts like emails or simple text messages can and should be designed. Using paragraphs to set a good reading tempo is just an example of that.

Companies are designed. Leaders at companies make decisions every day that shape the way organizations work and eventually perform. Ben Horowitz’s book has many chapters about design. Just a very specific form of it.

Since the outcome will be designed by definition it is very important to be aware of the potential implication a decision makes during the design process. Good designers will think about the likely and unlikely scenarios, the likely and unlikely impact an object is going to have on its surroundings and the emotions a design is going to generate.

Pay attention. Design everything. It matters.

Silicon Gardens Fund

2014-05-28T11:25:46-07:00

Something that was brewing for a while was finally announced yesterday - the Slovene startup ecosystem finally got a long awaited early stage fund.

Boštjan, Andraž, Jugoslav, Peter worked tirelessly for over a year and have overcome a ton of bureaucratic overhead to make this happen.

I’m particularly excited by the fact that the investors in the fund are a mix of local entrepreneurs with experience in building fast growing technology companies and seasoned investors like Fred, Jerry and Brad that have seen incredibly successful companies from start to IPO. Both have experienced the ups and downs of building a successful business.

The fund is obviously targeting first time entrepreneurs that have high potential and the ambition to tackle big problems on an international scale. The learning curve is steep and having the possibility to build a network fast and getting advice from seasoned entrepreneurs can often be a deciding factor of success. Knowing pretty much all the parties involved in the fund I’m confident that everyone is going to work extremely hard to make entrepreneurs and their teams successful, not only in their professional life, but also on a personal level.

The region has witnessed some incredible success in the past few years in getting teams on the radar of international customers and investors. There is more to come, that’s for sure.

Communications are big.

2014-02-19T20:45:39-08:00

Whatsapp is now part of Facebook. The deal is – by a large margin – the largest-ever acquisition of an internet company. The second largest deal is Skype - Microsoft at half the price Facebook paid.

Both are communications products. Both enable people to fulfil a fundamental human need - to communicate with friends, family and other human beings.

Both engage people in conversations and re-engage people through meaningful notifications.

A lot of sharing happens in private conversations. Facebook has used the sharing growth graph several times to indicate its own growth. Sharing in a non-public way, or on a platform that is not Facebook is directly competing for people’s attention and amount of sharing that would otherwise happen on Facebook.

The communications of the future are not constrained to a unique vertical. Every experience that touches more than one person as part of the story should enable those people to communicate, to share in a way that is optimal for that experience.

The communication experience in a marketplace for home repair professionals will be different from communications in a dating product, a calendar, a ride-sharing product or an application for sports fans.

The focus will be on building delightful, engaging experiences on top of full infrastructure building blocks. One of the bigger ones being communications.

Glass + Software

2014-01-03T13:11:35-08:00

The image is the glass and the glass is the product.

After reading Ben Evan’s post “The Spread of Glass,” some of the thoughts I had when I first saw the original iPhone came to mind.

The devices we used to own were hardwired for specific purposes. Each had hardware controls: cameras had fixed buttons, TV remotes had fixed buttons, and a typewriter with an English querty keyboard could not magically change to a French azerty layout.

Today glass is the omnipresent, universal medium that transfers the software experience to the outside world. We carry it around all day, every day. We have it in our living rooms, we have it in our bedrooms. We even have it hanging on our walls. The new generation of devices we carry around are glass windows into software.

Software gives glass unlimited uses through interfaces designed for specific purposes - from broadcasting content to generating content, each with a different set of controls for the task at hand. Different for writing, recalling memories, creating music, messaging friends.

Glass + Software gives us, the creators of software building blocks and software -powered experiences more than just power and flexibility. It gives us the responsibility to create something truly great.

Ambience

2013-12-15T22:01:25-08:00

Today, Kevin Rose published an conceptual idea for a new blogging tool, Tiny.

Without going into judging if the world needs another blogging tool/platform or not, I find the idea of adding ambiance to the publishing medium extremely interesting.

I think incorporating ambience into communications product would add another layer of information that is conveyed to the other party in a conversation. This way the interface around the conversation would change if you were at a beach, in a park or at a club, most probably influencing the mood and tone of the conversation.

Think of it almost like taking a photo of the location you are communicating from to give the other participants in a conversation a bit of perspective on where you are and how does it feel to be there. It helps convey the emotion of being in that location to the other party.

Experimenting with this kind of new concepts should be extremely simple in communications. I’m excited that we’re enabling that with Layer.

Re-start

2013-11-16T19:16:40-08:00

It has been a long year in which I didn’t really publish much.

After leaving vox.io at the end of January and taking some time off to reflect, I focused on building Layer with an amazing team.

While I have been writing a lot for myself and the Layer team, I didn’t really get the chance to collect, refine and share my thoughts with the rest of you.

Starting today I’m going to publish more thoughts around the topics I’m deeply passioned about - communications, design, and technology.

Feels good to be back.