Cola needs You To Spend As Little Time As possible In Its New Messaging App

For any new smartphone messaging app, the largest hurdle is getting people to modify over from the ones they already use, similar to WhatsApp, facebook Messenger, and even undeniable previous SMS. To win their hearts and minds, new messaging apps must walk a tightrope between introducing new options and aping the de facto same old interface that users know and love. The startup Cola’s new app, launched on Wednesday, toes that line while providing further chat capabilities to keep your conversations short and productive—so you could get on with the rest of your day.

“Our goal is to not keep you in our app all day long—it’s to make choices quickly and transfer along,” says Cola founder and CEO David Temkin. “as a minimum 30% of text message visitors is enjoying coordination, scheduling, did-you-do-this-or-do-that, the place do you want to move, and many others. These are the issues that Cola is supposed to streamline. The more you get executed in our app with the least quantity of work, the easier we feel.”

Cola’s visual simplicity makes it intuitive to pick out up and use. the place most chat apps have the “add a photograph” button, Cola has a pop-up list of six functions (termed “Cola bubbles”), together with “Share My vicinity,” “Take a poll,” and “When do we Meet?” obviously, these capabilities have existed in B2B chat apps for some time, but Cola is geared toward common shoppers to replace their commonplace drift of pogo-sticking between apps. for example, when another Cola user lets you track them, you just scroll back up to that bubble to take a look at their region, without a app-switching vital. There’s even a bubble bar floating on prime of the conversation for users to jump to active bubbles instead of having to scroll from side to side.

but Cola’s standout characteristic is that your friends don’t want to obtain it. Baked into the app heritage is the ability to send any Cola “bubble” over SMS as a link, which your pal clicks to interact with by way of the internet browser window. although location sharing best works whereas that pal has their browser window open, almost the entire performance of the app is preserved. And it’s quick, too. regardless of plugging in information over a browser as an alternative of app-to-app, the tips (ballot solutions, map locations) updates fractionally slower.

That’s as a result of the heavy again-finish work the Cola team has performed in view that asserting the outlet of Cola’s open beta closing November—and the extensive expertise of its staff. Bucking the stereotype of a younger hipster group of workers, Cola’s youngest workforce member is 38. Temkin, who started at Apple working on the Newton and moved on to AOL, says this expertise pool reflects a long time of getting projects carried out.

“There are plenty of issues occurring in this product that a first-time crew would possibly no longer have idea thru. folks on the workforce have stubbed their toes before and realized what works and what doesn’t,” says Temkin. “this can be a group that is ready to ship merchandise to succeed in tens of millions of people, both from a technical and a product design standpoint.”

each of the “bubbles” are mini-apps of a form, explains Temkin, and a lot of work went into making them open and shut as customers scroll thru their chat historical past. however making the bubble architecture straightforward to handle and efficient can be a intelligent move by Cola to lay the groundwork for the app as a platform. Bubbles take 1/10th to 1/100th the hassle to build as completely new apps, says Temkin.

It’s too early for Temkin to invest on a possible “bubble market” during which users would possibly pick and make a selection totally different bubbles—in any case, the Cola crew focused on six of them at launch for simplicity’s sake, and overloading the bubble list would clash with the convenience of use that Cola is touting. however there are a few other bubbles that may well be released in the close to future, reminiscent of a restaurant picker, a flight tracker, and a conference call bubble. within the meantime, Temkin needs builders to consider this option as a new type of modular software, particularly to construct firm-explicit bubbles for B2B applications.

“We designed Cola to be a platform in a device. each bubble adheres to the same regulations of physics that enable you keep in mind as a person, and each and every new bubble is not like finding out a brand new quasi-app,” says Temkin. “It also makes it one thing that may speedy become an ecosystem.”

Cola launched Wednesday on iOS, with an Android liberate deliberate in the following couple of months. After that, they plan to announce a device development package for bubbles. Down the street, Cola could offer a more refined skilled model for B2B consumers to fortify productiveness within the office, but Temkin anticipates that 1/3 parties will seemingly construct bubbles specific to their endeavor workflow ahead of then.