Invisible software is about to kill your favorite business app

A lot of current business apps are just glorified HTML forms.

Let’s look at some examples:

• 💸 Expense reporting software,
• 🐛 Bug tracking software,
• 🏖️ Vacation tracking software,
• ⏰ Time tracking software,
• 👥 Employee engagement software,
• and many more…

As a regular employee, you probably use these kinds of apps once or twice a month. First, you play the log-in-password jujitsu. You then somehow manage to log in and struggle to find the one thing you actually want to do.

Finally, you find the form and fill it in. This step is the only one that actually matters. All the stuff before and around… is just waste.

For people on the ground — for people that actually do the work — such business software is a burden. They want to get the work done. They don’t want to learn your new fancy UI or install yet another mobile app.

We are using too much software — or maybe too little

Every office worker has their core productivity software:

• Photoshop/Sketch… if you’re a designer.
• CRM… if you’re a sales person.
• Code editor… if you’re a developer.
• Hubspot… if you’re a marketer.
• Text editor… if you’re a copywriter.
• Accounting software… if you’re in finance.

You get my point. This software, obviously, needs UI.

But if we carefully examine our month, we don’t interact with 2 or 3 business apps. If you’re like me, the number is closer to 10.

There’s nothing wrong with using many business applications. In fact, I believe we should be using even more software. If it augments us and lets us spend more time doing our core job — I’m all up for it.

Which leads us to…

The era of invisible software

What is invisible software? It’s software that asks me for input and displays some output… and then goes away. In some cases, I don’t even need to know it exists.

An example: I don’t need to love your expense reporting software. I happen to use it because I need to buy some stuff on behalf of my company. The expense software is in the middle and it helps me document the transaction.

But I don’t need to love it.

Maybe, I don’t even need to “touch” it. That’s why expense reporting software will soon run on close to zero touchpoints (for most users).

Let’s look at how expense reporting will become invisible:

• It will know when I purchased something. Automatically.
• It will receive an itemized receipt from the merchant. Automatically.
• It will know I was in a meeting with a billable client. So it will apply the expense to the client. In case it won’t know, it will ask me to “attach” a client. Semi-automatically.
• And then it will push everything to the accounting system. Automatically.

Zero-to-one touchpoint. Invisible software.

Why Slack is the invisibility cloak for business software

I believe Slack is pulling us closer to the invisible software reality. Why is that?

At its core, Slack is a simple communication tool: it enables you to talk to your colleagues either directly or via shared channels.

But Slack is also so much more:

• Slack is ubiquitous: It’s probably the only software that everyone in the company uses on a daily basis.
• Slack is used on a daily basis: It’s the one software that people actually check. If you want people to see something — Slack is your best option.
• Slack has a notification system: It has a very reliable cross-device notification system.
• Slack has a developer ecosystem: It has a good set of tools and UI components available to developers. And they’re getting better fast.

Let’s go back to the invisibility theory. Looking at Slack through this prism it provides a platform to run and interact with simple business apps. It has notifications, it has user presence and it has a canvas plus basic UI elements to interact with the user (when needed).

This means that a simple business app consisting of standard HTML layout elements can now run fully in Slack.

Which means there is:

• ✅ No front-end,
• ✅ No mobile app to install,
• ✅ No new UI to learn,
• ✅ No new account creation,
• ✅ No e-mail notifications.

Invisible app pings you whenever it needs some input. And it outputs information upon your request or whenever the context makes sense.

The benefits of invisibility software approach are multifaceted:

• Benefits for managers: get information from their workers that’s needed in a timely manner,
• Benefits for workers: can focus on their core job,
• Benefits for app developers: can focus on reducing the interaction with users (instead of increasing engagement as its often the case now)

The app (almost) goes away. And this is as close to invisibility as it gets.

Welcome to the future!

P.S. I would love to hear your take on this — feel free to chat me up on Twitter 👉 @jmarovt

About Oneteam: Oneteam is our first take on invisible software. It is the simplest way to focus your team. And it runs fully and only in Slack. Check it out →

Originally published at oneteamhq.com.