Chatloop
As product development partner for Chatloop, we helped to scope and build their ambitious social media platform that transforms every page of the internet into a place to start conversations with friends.
“Experience the power of social browsing and share powerful content with the world. Chatloop makes every website social, giving you the power to spark contextual conversations that count.
Our Approach
The first step was an in-depth discovery stage that included workshops, creating personas, reviewing competitors, collecting design inspiration, analysing third-party providers of tech solutions that could be integrated into the solution, analysing risks and developing potential monetisation strategies.
All of this work informed which route would allow the app to have all of the functionality that Chatloop wanted in a way that meant the user would have the best experience.
Several options were considered, including forking an Open Source mobile browser as a base, but due to the complexity and fact that other browser implementations were written in a way that would double or triple our UI iteration efforts, we knew building a browser was the approach that would result in the best experience.
In order to reduce the prevalence of ‘bad actors’, we needed to simply, effectively, and quickly verify each user. We chose to include facial recognition software to verify every user when creating their account.
This means bad actors can be removed from the platform and are prevented from signing up again, helping to address digital hate, bullying, and misinformation on the platform.
Outcome
Our team of designers, developers and delivery managers completed the full build of the app in including building the bespoke browser. For the browser, we implemented the address bar from scratch which required a number of considerations to make it feel right. For example, missing “https://“ or not typing a proper domain name. Just entering text needs to trigger a search in your search engine of choice, tapping once on the input needs to select all the text. All these micro-interactions are something users just take for granted, and when they’re not there – they get frustrated.
Key features built into the bespoke browser include:
- Tab previews
- Browser history with a search function
- Bookmarking
- Sharing links
- Private browsing mode that requires a completely different security context
On top of the browser features, we layered the core app functionality of ‘dropping a loop’. When dropping a loop, users can highlight a section of a web page or an image and add a comment to start a conversation with other users. We then use Artificial Intelligence (GPT-3) to automatically tag content with the relevant category.
Alongside the internet browsing and interactivity features, we built in all of the social networking features that users have come to expect. These include:
- Registering, creating and managing a profile
- Personalisation
- The ability to follow and tag other users (prompting their content to show in the user’s feed)
- Trending topics
- Reactions
Chatloop has been so well received already, and we are delighted to be announcing the initial phase of beta testing that will be live from the 5th of December.
We have formed an unrivalled team of tech and business experts, working alongside our partners at Parallax.
This developmental, early access phase is set to take about three months, so we can properly test the system, but we’re very much looking forward to the full release early next year. Feedback is so important to us, and the collaboration between Chatloop, brands and our communities, is already well underway.
This is a unique product that the teams have created, and brands are already telling us that they love. The support we have had from investors, brands, and potential customers, is unheard of. As well as being able to draw upon our advisory board of experts, means that we are quietly confident that beta testing will go smoothly