Instant messengers are unreliable
Just imagine yourself in a situation like this:
You’ve sent something urgent to a very important person but s/he is not responding to you. S/he is “online” and it seems that s/he is ignoring you.
or:
You’ve just sent something very urgent and very important but the person is “last seen a second ago …” And you have to wait until s/he is “online” again.
or:
You’re in a hurry but a very important person “is typing …” a message to you. So you have to wait and after 10 minutes you realize it’s just a couple of words.
There might be other situations like these. Someone said, “things do not happen — they are made to happen.” And we think these situations were made to happen because of the design — a typical design of a typical instant messenger. There is a lot of instant messengers outside and most of them are very similar to each other. They all have bubbles, they have an input field, and a “Send” button. And they are all designed to be unreliable.
So one day, we have asked ourselves — How can we design a reliable messenger? The messenger for urgent and very important messages.* And that’s how we have designed our Crash messenger.
* we call them “crash” messages
“Form follows function.” This means that the interface of Crash should correspond to its functionality — it should be ideal for urgent and very important messages. At the same time, it should be intuitive and easy to use.
Notifications
The first major difference of Crash is its notification. Since Crash is designed for urgent messages, there is only one type of notification — the pop-up alert notification. It‘s like a notification for an incoming call, not an incoming message. And it has a loud, endless sound.
To stop this crashing sound, you have two options — “Ignore” or “Answer.” If you choose to ignore, the person writing to you will be immediately notified that you’re ignoring him or her. It’s just like a hang-up.
Moreover, this notification cannot be changed or disabled. This means that you — or the person you are writing to — cannot simply ignore the crash message without any sign. And that’s why there is no “Last seen” or “Online.”
Current chats
In a typical messenger, the first page you see is a list of your current chats. In Crash, there is no such page. Or, in other words, the list of current chats in Crash is simply the contact list. So the first page you see is the contact list in ABC order. The people writing to you right now will be on top.
Bubbles
There are no bubbles in Crash. The screen is split into two areas: the upper one is for the person you are writing to, the lower one is for you. And there is no message history. You can see only the last five lines. For short and urgent messages, five lines are more than enough.
At first glance, it seems that there might be some confusion. When you look at these screenshots, it’s not clear where is the question and where is the answer. However, when two people are writing messages simultaneously to each other, it doesn’t matter.
Keyboard
In a typical messenger, you don’t initially see the keyboard on the chat’s page. It pops out only when you tap on the input field. In Crash, the keyboard is always visible. When you’re dealing with urgent messages, it’s important to get rid of all those small movements and extra taps. “Just start typing …”
“Send” button
The person you’re writing to doesn’t need to wait until you tap on the “Send” button. In Crash, there is no such button at all. A message is simply a line of text. You’re sending a message when you move to another line or hit “Enter.” Or — the message will be sent after ten seconds of inactivity.
Profile pictures
There are no profile pictures and no emoji in Crash. Instead, there is an emoticon showing your current mood. Just tap on it and you can select another one. This way you can quickly express that your current mood have changed. You can also show different emoticons to different people.
The number below your emoticon indicates how much messages you’ve already sent to the person. When you reach 1,000 messages, the indicator simply changes to “1K,” and so on. As mentioned above, the maximum length of a message is one line of text. So the indicator shows the number of lines.
Conclusion
We have noticed that most people usually send short messages. And most of the time — very short messages, just a word or two. Moreover, urgent and very important messages — or crash messages — are also usually short. That’s why the length of a message in Crash is only one line. Ideally, it fits any line from The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.
So to conclude, we “took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Update:
I’ve published a link to this article at HackerNews. After some time, a new messenger appeared that was called Honk. It was a complete copy of the ideas I descired in my article. But, after some more time, Honk was closed — https://honk.me/sunset.
I guess, it’s not enough to copy the ideas. Honk’s overall image was different from Crash — it was fun. It was a fun way to chat with friends. In my opinion, that’s why people didn’t need Honk. It was not different from iMessage, Messenger, or Instagram DM. While Crash was designed for emergency, for urgent situations. Crash was “an important app”. People usually keep important apps on their phones, while “funny apps” are only temporary.
