I’m William, a product designer based in San Francisco, California.
Currently, I’m working at Height — focusing on collaboration & task managment.
On the side I’m working on Kip , a score-keeping app for iOS.
I like to capture the world around me through photos

Quick Reply Composer

Front ∙ 2018

Context

Front is a communication platform for teams helping customer-facing teams better interact with their customers across a variety of external communication tools. We saw an increase in the number of users of our iOS app and decided to make some improvements to the message composing experience.

Replying with context

Conversations in Front are a mix of external messages (inbound & outbound), activities & internal comments. Replying to a message often times requires being able to access all this context. Previously, the message composer would be presented on top of the conversation, requiring the user to close & open the composer frequently.

A conversation with messages, activities, internal comments & a draft

A fluid experience

To improve this experience, we focused on a multi-state composer. Depending on your needs, the composer can switch to a collapsed, compact or expanded mode.

The composer can fluidly transition between the collapsed, compact and expanded modes
Compact & expanded states. The compact variant focuses on quickly replying to a message, while the expanded mode offers the ability to change the subject of the email and attach files

Multi channels support

Front is primarily focused on email conversations, but also supports Twitter threads and SMS chats. This implies having to support character limits & autocompletion of usernames and hashtags.

Twitter variant
SMS variant

Outcome

When releasing this new composer, we included an option to let users choose between the new composer or the regular fullscreen mode. Initial metrics revealed that 75% of users were using the new composer.

Collapsed to compact transition

Links