The initial draft featured the subject as line 1. Line 1 is important because it’s the anchor that you’d use to scan the Inbox for information. At the workplace you tend to communicate, predominantly, with the same, small group of people. To use this similar set of names as anchors to distinguish between messages seemed counter intuitive. Considered the Web's highest honour, there was a buzz of excitement at the office when we were nominated. Ultimately, we didn't win the critics' award but we did win the fans' award for Best Interface Design, iOS.
Designing the iOS app had been my focus at CloudMagic and getting a Webby for that very particular aspect of the app – well, shit, ofcourse I was happy about it.
But I had always been suspicious of awards and I continue to distrust them deeply. It completely broke down for me when I realised that we had to pay to enter the competition – how is that remotely fair? It basically means: it's not the Web's highest honour, it's the highest honour for the people who paid to apply for the damn thing; it's a reward for vanity and bloated budgets.
There is a pattern of shady behaviour associated with award programs – this is not just a criticism of the Webby's itself, it's rife in every single industry including the Real Estate and Architecture world that I have been a part of for the last 5 years. These competitions make new categories every year, encouraging more applications and a greater chance to win something... anything. It's come to the point where every single new real estate project in Mumbai launches with a barrage of awards. And you should see the quality of thought and design in these projects – it's the pits.
I suppose this brings me to my point. I was immensely proud of the app that we had built. But winning the Webby is definitely not in the list of things I was proud of. Without further ado, here's the list:
We were competing with the likes of Google and Microsoft and Slack and Mailbox. The final user experience was comfortably better than the behemoths. This is the shit that matters, not a Webby.
Looking back, I think this was possible because:
We were a (relatively) tiny team. The entire office had around 25 people. The design team had 3 people. We worked closely and we worked well. I remember working very closely with the iOS team – it's one of my favourite memories of working at CloudMagic. The dev team was strictly patrolled and they had a set of priorities that they had to follow. It was a tight run ship. But once everyone had clocked out, and it was just Suhas and me at the office – we could start working on fine tuning the app, the interactions, the timings, the delays, the flashes, the indescribable stuff that eats away at you, and the stuff that developers don't have the luxury to focus on. We both had the extra time and we had the inclination. I hated feature rich apps that did everything in a mediocre way, I aspired to the apps that did very little but did it well. This was our way of achieving that
We had a great platform to build on. The original CloudMagic was a search app – it searched all your cloud data in real time. It was blazing fast. It was a chunky looking thing but boy, did it go! The dev team that built that app was the same team that worked on this app – they were competent and passionate about what they did and they had a solid base to start from as they had been working on searching your mail as well. It was a no-nonsense bunch of guys who were very good at what they did. I love being challenged, and conversations with them were challenging. Another positive memory I have is the making of the website for the app. For apps, it's usually an afterthought – a single page that just links you to the Android or iOS App. A couple of devs and I decided to put together something nice – for no other reason than to put together something nice – that would be reflective of the thought and effort that was put into the app. We made the time and got it done. It was nice.
We were consistently highly rated by our users across platforms. Every morning an automated mail would deliver a summary of all new ratings and reviews – as much as you'd like to not like this stuff, it was a nice hit of dopamine.
We especially loved the uncomplicated reviews.
We got reviewed by Joanna Stern as well!
