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Simplicity as a feature

What makes a mobile app easy to use, intuitive, and delightful? In a word, simplicity. When we were in the planning stages of Glassboard, our goal was to make it as easy as possible to communicate with small groups.

The Glassboard team has always agreed on one thing: make the app simple. In fact, this philosophy has been touted by both our iPhone and Android developers in years past, what with this interview with Brent Simmons on learning to be “ruthless about simplicity” and Nick Bradbury on his blog sharing his experience with implementing simplicity in his software.

Which is why when it came down to what features to include in 1.0, and subsequently 2.0, we did a lot of cutting. In fact our biggest priorities for major releases has been to make the app better looking and faster. Adding features at times was an afterthought. A lot of mobile collaboration apps have some great features such as lists, calendaring, and polling. I’m not saying we won’t ever include anything like those in Glassboard, I’m just saying it’s more important to us to give you a simple way to communicate. All the bells and whistles are nice, but we’d like to have a solid base to build those on.

Another factor that we’ve often mentioned is the privacy settings in Glassboard. There aren’t any because it is always private. Although Facebook and Google+ provide a way to collaborate as a group privately, there are a number of steps to be taken to do so. In fact, this post about bringing G+ to the workplace inspired me to write this: although G+ is loaded with features for collaboration, one has to take an extra step to ensure privacy within a group.

If you find Glassboard to be wonderfully simple, yet effective and screaming fast, we’ve done our job. If you’d like to see more out of Glassboard, that’s great! We like to hear suggestions for what features to add. As long as we know what’s most important to you, that’s what we’ll look towards adding next.

Posted by Jenny Blumberg