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Project Overview
With a clean, minimalist interface and an ultra-light, intuitive flow, Inbox Messenger has innovated on design in messaging where so many have been content to stick to the status quo.
Inbox Messenger is a modern, design-first approach to mobile messaging aiming to improve conversation for you and your friends. The team’s less-is-more philosophy helps keep Inbox’s features focused on your comfort while messaging - you can unsend texts (great for those dreaded mistakes) and activate a privacy screen for your texts - all this translates into better conversation between you and your friends.
Organisation
Team
Inbox Messenger was founded in 2013 to bring the focus of mobile messaging back to conversation. Our founders, Maher Janajri and Hani Shabsigh, are former management consultants who met at a 24-hour tech hackathon. Being highly mobile professionals, they were dissatisfied with the status quo of today’s messaging app options (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.) - the apps felt old and clunky, and in need of an innovative perspective.
One of the key reasons for their underwhelmed impression of messaging was the sameness of the design across the various options - every messaging app just felt bland, nothing more than the sum of its parts. So they set off to create a new, bold spin on messaging that put beautiful design front & center.
Inbox Messenger’s design lead, Jordi Navarro, brings a diverse set of design experiences to the app. With years of experience in architecture, interior design, landscaping and even food design, Jordi applied a fresh design perspective to the much-needed, run-of-the-mill messaging app space.
The other key reason for the team's dissatisfaction with current messaging options was the lack of privacy options. From both the user-to-user and user-to-company perspectives, current messaging apps felt too permanent and simply not trustworthy. The team conducted months of research with experts in psychology and sociology to understand what drove good conversation. That research led to the careful selection and execution of features that create a coherent experience.
Project Brief
Ever send a text you regret?
Ever felt like someone was reading your texts over your shoulder?
Bored with the status quo of messaging?
Inbox Messenger was designed to be a new way to experience mobile messaging and the design of the app’s interface and flow is meant to immerse the user immediately into something familiar but with a refreshing twist. With a bold, clean design and features for privacy, Inbox Messenger aims to re-focus the messaging industry on you and your conversations.
The first thing you’ll notice about Inbox Messenger is its design. We’ve put our minimalist design front & center to give you the breath of fresh air and lightness that is absent from today’s messengers. This design is meant to keep the experience clean and smooth so that you can enjoy your time in the app and focus on having great conversations with your friends.
Inbox’s two key features add to your conversations by keeping them flowing. With the ability to unsend texts, you can let your thoughts out as fast as your fingers can type - knowing that you can take back anything that doesn’t make sense. And our privacy screen allows you to feel comfortable texting privately in a public space - crowded trains or coffee shops can be reclaimed as your places to text comfortably.
Project Need
Inbox Messenger takes the current trajectory of mobile messaging and turns it on its head. Mobile messaging today is clunky and excessive, with dozens of messaging apps competing with each other on who can add more features to the product - GIFs, stickers, music, etc. - all while leaving the user out of the conversation. Inbox innovates by doing the opposite, by taking a less-is-more approach and giving our users what they want, which is a mobile messaging platform that is efficient, comfortable, and trustworthy.
With our clean, minimalist design, users can feel like their messaging app is finally on-par with the other technologies they use in their lives. And Inbox’s two key features - unsend texts and privacy screen - were carefully selected and created to create the most comfortable messaging experience possible. The result is a coherent experience that feels different from the norm.
User Experience
The primary way the user interacts with the app is by messaging their friends and utilizing Inbox’s two key features - unsend texts and privacy screen. It’s important that the user feels light and comfortable while messaging using the app.
While designing the app, it was important to maintain fundamental elements of app design in order to keep the app intuitive, but we stripped away the excess clutter that many users find distracting in order to re-focus the experience on the most important aspect of messaging - your conversations. Since we grew up with messaging, we were able to deconstruct the standard, all-too-familiar format and filter out the excess while retaining the essential pieces. Then we applied a minimalist aesthetic to those parts to create a clean, fresh experience.
Through a simple and straightforward sign-up process, the user is greeted by a first conversation from the Inbox Team (@teaminbox) that helps familiarize you with the app interface and the two key features - unsend texts and privacy screen - through short, 6-second videos. The user can then practice chatting with the Inbox Team or can go straight to messaging their friends, either with the app’s built-in invite system or by simply searching for their friend’s Inbox username. The whole experience is designed to be lightweight and fast but not overly busy or rushed.
Project Marketing
The marketing for Inbox Messenger to-date has been primarily growth-focused and achieved through organic, word-of-mouth tactics. The app is messaging which means it is inherently shareable and we’ve found that people are comfortable inviting a few of their friends and family to try Inbox with them.
This allows the team to focus on getting the word out to communities that are tech-savvy and early adopters, such as the tech startup communities and college campuses here in NYC. With the ability to give live, in-person demos, we’ve been able to engage customers immediately and give them a first-hand experience with the app. This show-not-tell approach has proven effective, both from the real reactions we receive from the customers on the spot (the instant smirk with an unsent text or the wide eyes with the privacy screen activation) and from the usage activity we observe.
The next phase of our marketing will be brand-focused. We intend on associating the Inbox Messenger brand with design-focused organizations (like design100) and arts/cultural organizations (think Museum of Modern Art or Tribeca Film Festival.) Through these partnerships, we hope to share Inbox Messenger with like-minded communities who will appreciate our design and share alike.
Project Privacy
We consider privacy to be sacred when it comes to building a tool that people entrust with something as personal and intimate as their messages - we believe users deserve to feel like they can trust the tool delivering their messages and comfortable in their messaging experience. Everything from our back-end servers to our app’s features have been designed with the user’s comfort in mind.
Our data is stored on secure servers where they are held privately (meaning we can’t access your confidential data - password, messages, pictures, etc.) which means your content is safe.
From a user experience perspective, Inbox Messenger provides you with two powerful ways to keep the messages you create private. First, the app allows you to unsend messages even if they’ve been read, which gives you control over your content. And second, the app has a privacy screen feature which visually encrypts your texts so you can feel comfortable and texting privately in a public space.
Best Mobile or App Startup
This category relates to Startups working on a Mobile project or an App. The project could be for smartphones, tablet, web, game console or api apps. Startup projects need to be newly emerging, less than 5 million users and less than 3 years old.
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