A New Chapter for Hylo: Redesigning for Joy, Usability, and a Bioregional Future

We are excited to share the news that Hylo is embarking on a phase of redesign and rediscovery in 2024 to enhance the technology to better serve the needs of purpose-driven and place-based groups!

Our goal with this redesign is to re-envision and modernize the core Hylo user experience to deliver the tools purpose-driven groups need on a more performant platform that rivals the ease and usability of best-in-class messaging, chat, and collaboration technologies.

We have identified five priority areas to guide the UX redesign:

1. Usability: Fixing all bugs, improving the look and feel, and ensuring the UX is fast, smooth, easeful, and beautiful, with performance and reliability to match leading social apps.
2. Mobile: Rethinking our mobile app strategy to focus on the functions most needed in a mobile experience, such as chat and messaging. We aim to dramatically improve the performance and polish of our mobile app.
3. “Fit to Purpose”: Ensuring that the Hylo UX is calibrated ever more faithfully to meet the unique needs of purpose-driven groups.
4. Onboarding: Streamlining the experience of joining Hylo, creating a group, and inviting more members, so groups can more easily grow and flourish.
5. Discoverability: Facilitating the discovery of relevant groups and content, so Hylo members and their networks beyond Hylo can more easily engage with the platform in ways that are meaningful to them.

This phase will also address one of Hylo’s overall focus areas: research and exploration to expand Hylo’s service to bioregional and place-based groups.

Our Process

The Redesign is an exciting opportunity to include Hylo stakeholders in shaping the future of Hylo as a technology commons. We’re calling this a “Collabathon,” to borrow a phrase from our friends at OpenTEAM, and we kicked things off with a series of sessions open to the Hylo community at the end of June.

These sessions touched on the priorities of Usability, Mobile, “Fit to Purpose”, and Onboarding/Discoverability. We held them in a fishbowl format, with our team discussing amongst ourselves for the first half of the call, then opening up the floor to discuss with all attendees for the second half. So much insight emerged from these sessions! We are now digesting and integrating those contributions, and these synthesis sessions are also open to participation from our stakeholders — find the invites in Building Hylo and join us!

Our plan is to open this process as much as we possibly can to participation from the community. We posted the recordings of the sessions to our channel on Youtube and we’ll stream many of the sessions as well. There are also ample opportunities to weigh in asynchronously on Building Hylo with discussions and proposals.

Once we get through integrating the initial round of input, we’ll share a proposed plan for the Redesign and ask for feedback from our stakeholders. We’re formatting the plan as a series of hypotheses, each with specific experiments we will run (the things we will actually build / change), and metrics to test against. After a round of review, we’ll move forward with product specifications and design.

Community Research

The Hylo Product team has a strong desire to deepen the “user research” that informs Hylo. To that end, part of the Redesign includes a few in-depth opportunities to share information with our team to inform the future of the technology:

Hylo Member Survey

Please take 5 minutes to complete the Hylo Member Survey! This is an easy way to make sure your brilliant ideas for Hylo make it into our product planning. We’re also going to start tracking some basic qualitative metrics like how easy it was to create an account or use different features, so that over time we can track our progress from the perspective of Hylo members. Your participation here will be a huge help. To say thank you, we have an exciting prize for a few lucky participants: By completing a survey, you’ll be entered into a raffle for a 1:1 Community Stewardship workshop with our Community Team!

Purpose-Driven & Place-Based Groups: Listening Sessions

We are also interested in interviewing purpose-driven groups about their needs and challenges, both in terms of technologies used as well as beyond that. We are especially interested in talking with place-based and bioregional groups. It would be very cool to livestream these conversations so that others in the Hylo community can learn from them, but they could also be a closed container if that’s more comfortable for the groups involved. To connect in this way, please reach out to me at clare@terran.io.

Our plan is that by the end of this redesign, you’ll have the Hylo you know and love, with our unique feature set and unique online culture, in a more beautiful, usable, and useful package. Our vision is to integrate these elements with a focus on improving usability, reducing friction in navigation and usage, and enhancing overall satisfaction, providing a smoother, more intuitive, and more joyful experience interacting with the technology.

Why now?

Since accepting stewardship of Hylo in 2020, we’ve partnered with many purpose-driven organizations to resource and co-develop Hylo. These amazing partners, including Planetary Health Alliance, Zebras Unite, Prosocial World, OpenTEAM, Tribal Resource Center, and others, co-designed features with our team to meet the unique needs of their communities, and we built and released these features to benefit everyone on Hylo. This way of working has shaped Hylo as a deeply unique offering among tools for collaboration and coordination: it truly reflects the groups that are a part of the Hylo network.

However, this approach did not provide ample resources to focus on Hylo’s essential needs as a technology: erasing technical debt, fixing bugs, enhancing performance, and creating an overall excellent user experience. This priority for too long has been on the backburner for us even though we recognized how absolutely critical it is for the fundamental Hylo experience to be rock-solid, and for us to grow.

This is why we are so thrilled to now embark on a phase of Redesign focused on ensuring that Hylo is an unmitigated JOY to use for our treasured community members! Our ability to focus on this is due to the generosity of the NoVo Foundation, with whom we share a deep-seated commitment to nurturing resilient communities and bioregional regeneration. NoVo has given us our first significant unrestricted grant, with the intention to be in long-term relationship, working together to turn Hylo into the best bioregional coordination tool possible. As part of the Redesign efforts over the course of 2024, we will initiate a research project to more deeply understand the needs of place-based groups. Once the first phase of UX improvements is implemented, we will be well-positioned to act on this research to build even more sophisticated tools for bioregional coordination.

The generous support from the NoVo Foundation is a powerful endorsement of our vision for a thriving future for all life, as detailed in our new website. We are deeply honored by their commitment to our mission.

Now is the perfect moment to join this transformative funding round for Hylo. We are seeking additional funding partners to provide the essential runway to complete our core platform, welcome many more people to the Hylo community, and achieve sustainable revenue in the coming years.

With this robust foundation, we can fully dedicate ourselves to addressing the profound challenges of bioregional coordination and regeneration. If you are inspired by this vision and have connections with foundations or philanthropists who feel the same way, we would love to hear from you. Please reach out to me at clare@terran.io. Thank you for joining us in this redesign, and in our purpose to activate the full potential of purpose-driven and place-based groups!