[ad_1]
Only six social Multimedia applications worldwide have one billion users or more, and four of them belong to Facebook. Tops is the eponymous flagship application, known as "Big Blue," followed by three apps all focused on messaging: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. So, when Facebook decided to make a significant overhaul of this latest system – used by 1.3 billion people – the key interface creator should be an experienced collaborator working at Menlo Park headquarters, surrounded by collaborators monitoring each of his movements.
Christian Dalonzo, 23, who was still a student at Rowan University in New Jersey when he created the "bubbly" atmosphere of what was then called M4, announced today after a long day gestation. He designed the experience of a billion people on the screen while he lived in the basement of his parents' home in South Jersey.
Christian Dalonzo
Dalonzo spent two summers interning at Facebook, integrated with the Messenger design team. He had been so impressive that the company had agreed to hire him after his stint in the summer of 2015, even as he was returning to New Jersey to finish his studies. The ideas that he proposed in his basement a year later allowed Messenger to develop his own distinct brand.
Nowadays, Facebook sees itself as a family closely linked to social applications all sharing an infrastructure. Whatsapp and Instagram were born as independent apps that were slowly integrated into this family, while Messenger was separated from Facebook in 2013 and now has the same status as these two acquisitions – large, large apps that are under the hood of Facebook. .
Messenger 4 is not a radical overhaul. But users will first notice that its tabs have been reduced from nine to three. Each tab calls a different screen. The first is Cats, the inbox in which you manage your conversations with friends – and the only one in which ads are currently merging with the conversation list. (Expect to see the sponsored content spread.) The second is People, essentially a "new age contact list," says product manager David Breger. At the top of this screen is a carousel – now oversized – from Stories of Friends, the ephemeral collection of photos and videos that is the fastest-growing feature of the Facebook ecosystem, and the best hope of the world. company to increase its income.
The third tab is Discover. Messenger, like Facebook, is also used by businesses. Messenger executives were frustrated that while millions of businesses use the service, users have been slower to engage with them. They hope this will change with M4.
Stan Chudnovsky, the vice president of Facebook at the head of Messenger, considers the three tabs as a recap of the white pages and yellow pages of the past. He calls the first two tabs "the people's repertoire". The Discover tab, meanwhile, includes the modern yellow pages, a gateway to commerce, games and other services, current and future.
Other M4 design elements display such items as backlog in your inbox and an improved way to organize group communications. Conversation threads can now be customized by color gradients, changing from one hue to another as the chat progresses. Even the logo has been refitted in a subtle way: the sharp angles of the stylized "M" flash have been rounded, to indicate that a more user-friendly experience is coming.
Finally, the Messenger team has produced a much more dramatic version of the dark mode, in which vivid and bright colors change their place, for a striking photo-negative effect. It will not start for a moment. But this is true for many aspects of the new Messenger: it is destined to grow and evolve.
M4 is the the maturity of a product that Facebook has ruthlessly carved out five years ago in its main application. When it launched its flagship application, Facebook, which had purchased a billion dollar email application and another for more than $ 20 billion, essentially created a potential third potential, free of charge and without fear that its founders do not take over as was the case with Whatsapp and Instagram.
In 2014, David Marcus, then president of Paypal, had the opportunity to evolve the user base of Messenger by 150 million. The shift "happened just before I got here," Marcus told me in February, when I was first informed of M4. (Last May, Marcus left the Messenger organization to explore the possibilities of a string of Facebook channels, and his lieutenant Chudnovsky took over.)
Marcus immediately realized that once Facebook's posts were out of Big Blue, the new app would flourish. "It allowed us to do many things," he says, citing notifications as an example. Many Facebook users have kept notifications disabled; By splitting the messages, the company assumed that users would be more likely to activate them. "Notifications are really paramount in a messaging app.If you send a message to people and they respond to you at the speed of an email, it's not normal." It is even more important, according to him, to have an autonomous application allowing his team to work in a more autonomous way. "We could create things much faster in an email application than in the Facebook application."
Build what they did – Messenger added voice calls, one-on-one and in-between groups. He added stickers and other visual functions such as the ability to feast pictures by giving your subjects a digital makeover. He opened his platform to strangers; Since then, more than 200,000 developers have used it to create games, interact with brands, and so on. He has deployed peer-to-peer payments. While its attempt to create a giant ecosystem of scholars, automated business robots was below its considerable hype, Messenger has still managed to attract about 20 million businesses, which trade more 10 billion messages with their customers each month. But as these features rolled out, user screens began to appear overloaded. "At some point, you can not continue to add new tabs," says Breger.
Another problem was the Messenger experience, which was not very distinctive. According to the design team, it was intentional. Because the app was originally a landing point for people whose communications had been initiated since Big Blue, Facebook wanted the transition to be as simple as possible. As Dalonzo says, he seemed "a little wired and sterile".
At the same time, competitors like Snap, Apple's iMessage and Facebook's Instagram had taken the lead by adopting innovations popularized by Messenger (like stickers) and by proposing new ones. The messenger designers realized that it was time for their application to get a more distinctive look. "We started creating something really expressive, fun and engaging," says Jeremy Goldberg, Product Design Manager for Messenger.
This is where the former trainee from New Jersey came into service. After completing his second internship, Dalonzo returned home with the agreement to continue working for Facebook while completing his undergraduate studies at Rowan, a few miles from his home. "I moved into our basement and turned it into a kind of dormitory: a couch, an office, a bed, a television," he says. The Messenger design team at Menlo Park was familiar with the dark blue wall in front of which Dalonzo was sitting during videoconferencing during meetings.
In November 2016, Dalonzo was working on a smaller problem that involved superimposing a whimsical set of frills on the actual content of a message. "I started playing to make things more sparkling, more playful, a little more friendly." The term that he liked was "lickable," the word used by Steve Jobs to describe the look and feel # 39; Aqua. , the Mac OS X interface of the early 2000s. Dalonzo proposed changes such as the ability to customize a conversation with different colors, which could change over the course of discussions. While he was sharing his ideas on the company's internal drawing board, his colleagues came to understand that these changes could lead to a general refresh of the entire Messenger experience and had encouraged to continue.
"In a business like Facebook, every pixel of the app is iterated or worked on continuously," says Loredana Crisan, director of product design, at the helm of the redesign team. "It's getting hard to rethink the whole system, so you're looking for those moments of risk opportunities – we were like," it's not just Christian in his basement playing with his ideas. "
In the spring of 2017, Crisan approached Marcus with the idea of merging Dalonzo's work into the Messenger roadmap. After graduating in May, Dalonzo moved to California and continued to work on the redesign, alongside an expanded team.
One of the main themes was some of the hidden features that many users did not take advantage of. A right-hand hit on the contact's name reveals options for sending text or starting a video or voice call. Previously, it was a multi-process. Collecting contacts for a group message also requires fewer steps. There is still a lot to come: soon, a long press on a message will allow you to instantly activate the release with emoticons, stickers or GIFs.
All was not easy. Streamlining Messenger into three tabs meant that some teams, such as those integrating games into the product, would lose their properties on the main screen. "When you want to take that away from them, it's very emotional," says Marcus.
Last December, designers introduced the new look of the application at a meeting with bare hands. It then took another 10 months, as Messenger executives experienced a transition, before the system was ready to be deployed to users.
Facebook's future lies in messaging. For the Big Blue app to exceed 2.2 billion existing users, it only has fruit left to lose. Properties such as Messenger however offer many easy options to attract more users and generate new revenue. One of the main reasons Facebook's reorganization last May was to have one person, Chris Cox, product manager, responsible for all applications. "I think the best of all worlds is when people and businesses communicate with each other in the same way as people," says Chudnovsky. "And all this is happening on the messaging platform."
Better yet, if it's lickable. Even if you have to go to a basement in New Jersey to get there.
Biggest cable stories
Source link
