Different Take on Real-time Collaboration

Back when Slack was less prominent, online collaboration was still a bit clunky. At that time the pitch for instant chat to replace email was loud, but there weren't many messaging applications that also allow efficient file viewing and management. I joined Moxtra to help create a mobile experience that helps merge the ease of communication with cloud file sharing, plus more. 

Although almost all chat applications offer some sort of file sharing and viewing, many are limited to only image files. And once the chat stream builds and pushes the images beyond view it's often difficult to retrieve them without tapping on a few UI elements. One of the main challenges for me, our project lead, and head of engineering is to find a way to move from chat to shared files quickly and easily. After exploration and several user testings, we felt the mobile swipe gesture was the easiest method to achieve that.  The screens below illustrates the flow from entering chat, swiping to files, and selecting an asset to view updates, annotations, and messages. 

As the demand for tasks and online meetings grew, we responded quickly. Flowcharts were devised to accommodate to-do assignments and meeting statuses and how each UX flow could fit intuitively with the Moxtra experience. To-do UI provides comprehensive detail about task assignments, and within the meeting we leveraged screen-sharing, video conferencing, and our unified file annotation tools to help provide a rich virtual meet. Each feature could be quickly accessed via simple swipes of the mobile display. 

Not once, but twice. Whoohoo!!  :)

The concept of Moxtra was very interesting. The app experience is extremely efficient at letting me perform various tasks very quickly, whether I want to send a quick chat or add an important annotation to a document so that my shared collaborators could view it. But over several years of refining the application the one thing which has always plagued real-time sharing, is bandwidth. With sub-par data link, mobile apps are really at its mercy. With Moxtra it's no different - chat fails to send and file annotations fail to update. Moving forward I think the team could devise in-app visual cues to alert local content that has yet to be synced and updated.