Product Design for Orbit

[haadcode]

We should create a document to capture what we think Orbit should be as a product.

• Purpose / Vision
• Target audience
• Features
• User experience
  • Each component/view/screen
  • Story boards of the "onboarding" flow (first time experience)
• Technical choices and trade-offs

Etc.

[victorb]

@haadcode I think it's important to think of all these things will contribute to the final user experience, not that user experience is a separate feature that we will be developing. The main goal with Orbit is to solve one or more problems. We have to figure out what problem that is and who the typical user is that have this problem/s. From there, we can "design" (think about, not actual pixels) solutions and figure out a narrative (with story boards and/or other tools) that exposes this solution. Once we have this, it'll be very easy to design the actual pages and the design, that would be the final artifact to actually implement and start doing some user testing with.

Does that sound reasonable?

[r0kk3rz]

I have a bit of a grander vision, of which orbit (and orbit-db) is a small but important part. Whilst technologically Orbit is quite cool, ultimately I don't think that simply being 'decentralised/distributed' is really that much of a selling point, so for eg. creating Slack but distributed, is probably not going to see a lot of use.

Instead I think there is benefit to keeping things small, effective, and interoperable, as opposed to these great big monolithic silos we see on the web today. So perhaps instead of something like Slack, think something which is a reusable embedable component like Disqus, a building block we can use to create the distributed apps of the future.

[haadcode]

instead of something like Slack, think something which is a reusable embedable component like Disqus, a building block we can use to create the distributed apps of the future.

Spot on @r0kk3rz on all your points! Exactly what I've been thinking too. Perhaps, some day, Slack will use orbit as its communication and/or "backend" tech :)

By not trying to make it a Slack clone, we also give ourselves a lot more freedom to experiment with the UIs and communication models as we don't have to compete head-to-head on product (frontend) level.

[shortcircuit3]

Product designer here trying to see how I can get involved! This seems like a perfect place to start :)

[haadcode]

@milesalex help would be highly appreciated! Follow this issue.

What needs to happen here first is for me to dump my vision into a document so that we can all discuss and iterate it. I'm planning on doing that (probably) at the beginning of December. Let me know if this is too far away and you'd need to get this work started earlier and I can try to fit that into to my TODOs perhaps a little earlier.

[jesseclay]

@milesalex have a chance to give this any thought? I'd be curious to see what you come up with!