Building a Meeting App, Day 3: Experimenting with Minimal Design
This is day 3 of the Building a Meeting App series, in which we create a functional meeting app from scratch in six days. We’ll be documenting every step of the process and will launch the final product on day 6 (Wednesday, September 6), ready for you to get your hands on.
After two days of determining what we’re going to build and sketching the structure of the app, today the concept is going to become a lot more concrete. We’re opening up our laptops at Caravelle downtown Barcelona, and start to work on the design of the product.
So what makes good design? To me, paradoxically, well-designed products are the ones with the least amount of design. Where the creator stripped down the product to its core and got rid of everything that was inessential. Those become the products that you understand right away. That need no manual or explanation. It’s there when you need it, it’s gone when you don’t. It helps you accomplish something, and doesn’t try to be anything that is unrelated to achieving that goal.
We started by experimenting with the look and feel of the product, designing the hand gestures we talked about yesterday. It turns out to be quite challenging to get it to look like a hand in a natural pose. We played around with lots of different font pairings and color combinations until it felt just right — which took us about three hours in total. Lots of options, only one we get to pick.
It seems as if, as soon as you get the branding right first, the rest just flows from those few elements. That’s how Maarten came up with the idea to put the hands under each other on the left. The hand representing the active step would be fully opaque, in contrast to the others. The three preparation steps are followed by a vertical line representing the time of the meeting, highlighting the minutes that are left. Finally, a sign-of-the-horns hand makes you feel like a rockstar when you finished the meeting on time (maybe not really, but you get the idea).
Keeping the feature set as simple as possible, as we did on the first day, helps a lot in setting up this design. We have the bar on the left, a title, a description and an area for writing — that’s all there is to it.
This natural flow from top (entering participants) to bottom (meeting done) feels very straightforward. There’s no explaining: you get to dive right in at step one, and know exactly what the next few steps will be. When you’re done, you’re done: there’s nothing more to it. You’ve completed your meeting. That’s the objective, and all this tool is trying to accomplish: to document your meetings so that everyone knows what to do afterward, with the least amount of hassle.
Up tomorrow: the first bits of code! I’ll try to show as concretely as possible how we use a design like this to create a working digital product. Only 2 days left until launch, see you tomorrow for day 4!
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