Skype Journal

Lukas Mathis says the new Skype for Mac is too complicated for casual users and not flexible enough for advanced users. His head is blogging what his heart knows: revulsion and alienation over the experience.

Skype’s Mac forum has been full of kvetching, frustration and despair. Alexia Tsotsis’ TechCrunch thread concurs, after Alexia threw in a sweet mockup for contrast. Designers (Davide Casali, Free Reyes, Iiro Jäppinen, Vasjen Katro, Florian Pichler, Pritthish Chakraborty, James Scott, Craig Philips) are tweaking Photoshopped concept art, yearning for a better Skype for Mac.

How did this happen?

Over on Quora, Hugo Ahlberg points to UX team 80/20 Group’s contribution to the new design. From their site:

Millions of people use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files. 80/20 worked with Skype to transform the user experience of its products, starting with the popular Mac client.

OVERVIEW

Skype’s Mac application was beginning to show its age as it packed in an ever-growing number of features. As a result, users were having a difficult time understanding and using the full breadth of its capabilities. Additionally, Skype saw the need to consolidate its product development efforts and drive user experience consistency across platforms. 80/20 worked with Skype on a ground-up redesign of its Mac client, which would set the stage for unification across its product lineup.

So the brief was to fix feature bloat, leaving room for future bloat. Oh, and to save on programming time by having one body of code/design.

SOLUTION

User testing and audits of the Mac client highlighted issues with window management, contact management and revealed that features didn’t have enough real estate to be articulated effectively. The new single-window design improves work flows between calling and messaging while supporting the common behavior of using the “call log” to initiate communication.

The cramped design didn’t offer enough screen space for all those features.

RESULT

The next-generation user experience for Skype Mac increases use of core features while providing a clean slate for growth. The success of the redesign is seen not only in the Mac client itself but in the design’s ability scale to touch-screen devices and beyond.

So:

• More pixels per feature.
• No features subtracted.
• One-window to hold everything.
• And a happy client.

Design is hard.

Harder still when you strive to run on every operating system, in every device, with all your features. You want to be true to the nuances that make a Mac app feel like it is native to the Mac. To Android like it was born there.

Yet those many flavors slow Skype’s time-to-market.

How do you hold fast to your core Skypiness, to what made people love you, and support new features for new markets, new use cases, new business models? Your backlogs overflow. The pressure is intense. Heck, I add to my Skype wishlist daily so I can only imagine what your iceboxes look like.

The tension between simple and power is killing you.

I know this. You know this. Everyone at Skype knows this.

The shrieks from Apple users? That’s the anguish of the stricken, losing their love for the Mac-like spare brilliance of their beloved 2.8 client. They forget they’ve been calling for feature and release parity with Windows users for years. Skype gave in to feature creep and bought in to a universal design for desktops, perhaps for tablets and mobiles too.

So here we are.

Seething.

Hoping.

Please see this moment as opportunity.

Take bold risks. Forget our gripes and take us someplace new in a way we hadn’t imagined that makes our hearts swell with pride.

Believe today’s minimalism pays later. You want a diverse developer ecosystem, yes? All those use cases cluttering your inbox? Leave those to third-parties. Let them build upon your ruthless simplicity.

Reconsider fundamental assumptions of what it means to Skype, to be Skype, to belong to Skype, to play Skype, to have Skype. The last seven years are merely prelude.

photo credits: cc-by siddharth vishwanathan (pic), Alberto Ortiz (pic).