Creating a design system and a peer-to-peer app for mobile & desktop—serverless chat for organizations, communities, and friends.
The design journey started with an insight into user needs for a familiar yet more secure chatting experience. Collaborating closely, the founder and I embarked on a one-day-a-week, iterative design process, drawing inspiration from leading chat apps to shape the unique serverless solution. Challenges like mimicking mainstream group chat functionalities on a Tor-based network required innovative approaches, tackled through focused, one-day sprints of research, prototyping, and feedback sessions. Utilizing Loom for design walkthroughs and Figma for collaborative feedback, we rapidly iterated features, some within a day, while more complex ones extended over several sessions. Our design system evolved on-demand, addressing the nuances of mobile and desktop user experiences and managing the dynamic nature of our design tasks with a component-based approach for efficiency and coherence.
Despite being in the early stages of user testing and feedback collection, Quiet's innovative approach to chat application design is already showing promising signs of impact. Our unique, once-a-week collaboration has enabled the founder to test designs and prototypes between sessions and adapt to user insights, refining our prototype to better meet the nuanced needs of our target audience. The serverless architecture, emphasizing data privacy and control, resonates well with users, particularly those wary of conventional server-based platforms. Preliminary feedback highlights appreciation for the app's familiar interface coupled with the novel control over data, setting Quiet apart. This phase of research and prototyping is critical, not only in fine-tuning the app's features but also in validating our design choices, ensuring they align with user expectations and preferences. As we continue to iterate based on user feedback, Quiet stands as a testament to the potential of focused, user-centered design to challenge norms and introduce meaningful innovation in the tech landscape.
Jason is unusually good at thinking through all the states a feature implies, and he has the maturity and humility to start with research and advocate for solutions that are already well-tested and familiar to users, rather than guessing at what might work.
