I’m currently living in a Northern European one and the income island thing was solved with city planning: the same area has mix of private and city owned apartment buildings. Some buildings are mix-owned too, so city owns like 50% of the apartments.
Here you’m find a person living on social security and someone with half a million apartment loan, having a neighbourly chat while their kids playtogether in the common courtyard.
Great work. As a European designer, really happy to see competition. Figma is slowly jacking up prices and companies are starting to lean on seats.
Figma has pretty much reached the point that they’re inventing features, pushing AI and expanding to other products (figjam, slides), because they’ve reached feature maturity on UI design long time ago and they need to make more money by expanding the other roles (PO, dev) from viewers to paid seats that actually use the tool.
So, you have a good fixed target here for Europeans: keep copying UI features from Figma and get European businesses to start switching over.
Your pricing is way too high.
World’s best UI design tool with all the extra tools? 16€. Your limited offer? 12€!
How about: 16€ ANNUAL. ”For the price of one month of Figma, get Vecti for the whole year.” - there’s a promotion text for the website too.
P.s. My list of must haves before I could consider switching:
- auto layout (w/ slots if possible!!)
- components
- very simple prototyping with click & scroll support
Prototyping is required for user testing, so I’d have to buy software for that if I’d use yours.
Edit:
I want to follow your progress. Could you have a mailing list where you update your feature implementation progress - let’s say once a month?
The brand and presentation seem to try to appeal to (young) tech savvy people; but those are the ones who are hardest to win due to so many different needs they have for their OS and software running on it. Similarly why people don’t move from Windows to Linux.
Thus, I’d be afraid this might very easily end up in the ”toy” category like the many alternative cloud or browser OSes.
So, instead, why not take a chapter from Chromebook’s.. book, and target the users with simplest needs: the non-technical. Those, who just ”need a browser in a laptop”.
New selling points:
- No need to update it, it takes care of its self
- No need to install suspicious apps, it can make the things you need
- No menus full of apps, settings and actions you will never use; only what you actually want
- You can’t break it, it can protect itself from accidents
- Never again odd error messages, it can always explain them to you ELI5 and help to fix them
And lastly:
- Nothing to ”learn” - always just ask and it’ll do it for you
Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.
It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.
Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.
The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.
I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.
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Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:
These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
”2 There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right EXCEPT such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
Are we reading the same thing?
This linked statement clearly authorizes invasion of privacy by public authorities, in the name of any of the very vaguely listed reasons – as long as there’s some law to allow it.
Wow. Looking at the schema for gif, it’s so readable, I can’t help to wonder why something like this hasn’t become the standard way to work with binary formats over the decades already!
Seems like eveything has to be JSON and text based these days, because binary is more difficult DX.
When reading articles discussing binary formats, I usually see them using box diagrams of packets, description tables or hexdumps.
This neatly describes nested structure, names and ”types” - just enough.
I wonder if there’s a hexdump like viewer in IDEs that can present binary files like this? I can also imagine a simple UI to make the files editable using this.
If it works for you, happy the help you setup a private instance or something. And for in-office use, maybe optimize for quality rather than minimal updates it is now.
After certain age, all school students up to university use/have a computer.
If they end up in an office job, they very likely will have/keep one around.
And even when not, people with higher education tend to like use the home computer for certain things. For example ”official stuff” like doing taxes, using government services. Maybe throw in some more detailed trip planning, hobbies, spreadsheets…
To be as user friendly as possible, always ask if user wants automatic background updates or not. If you can’t update without user noticing it, please implement manual updates as two mechanisms:
1) Emergency update for remote exploit fixes only
2) Regular updates
The emergency update can show a popup, but only once. It should explain the security risk. But allow user to decline, as you should never interrupt work in progress. After decline leave an always visible small warning banner in the app until approved.
The regular update should never popup, only show a very mild update reminder that is NOT always visible, instead behind a menu that is frequently used. Do not show notification badges, they frustrate people with inbox type 0 condition.
This is the most user friendly way of suggesting manual updates.
You have to understand, if user has 30 pieces of software, they have to update every day of the month. That is not a good overall user experience.
As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split.
I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors.
It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging.
Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.
True. When the complexity of the software causes lot of usability issues in ”edge cases”, these technically capable customer connected people are really worth it.
I’ve also seen good things coming from hiring actual ex-users from potential customers that were using competitor’s products. They’d do user training, customer software configuration and development team support. Sometimes even full time.
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But these people are good day-to-day at ironing out the details. Maybe even discovering underlying dissatisfaction with the product.
But the startup’s constant worry should be what else software is being used, how to be relevant in the future. Maybe through cutting costs in the process by co-designing new workflows to eliminate current tasks.
Executives at the client may be more intrested in finding ways to eliminate all the staff with automation in the process rather than optimizing their tools.
You’re not getting that input from the people working on the tasks now.