What if Slack, Loom, and Marco Polo had a baby? You might get something like PingPong.
An early marketing gif for PingPong.
My Role
Design Lead
Product development from ideation to implementation
Created Brand
Created component library
Founders Jeff Whitlock and Enaho Murphy were collaborating between the US and Nigeria. Text felt too cursory between them and it was often too laborious to type out detailed ideas.
What if there were a business communication tool that felt more calm, personal, and conversational? What if this tool came with media options depending on what you wanted to say and how you wanted to say it?
I joined as employee number eight and the sole designer. I’d always wanted to take the leap and join a small startup.
When considering branding we wanted something simple that still managed to hold its presence and feel actionable. Our brand was called out by TechCrunch as one of “The best logos of Y Combinator’s W21 batch”
For the in-app UI we went with a dark theme calm on the eyes. It’s also felt reminiscent of recording/editing software.
In our aim to harness calm and and create more meaningful communication, we focused on threading. Anyone who uses Slack knows that some of the most important exchanges of information happened in threads, but in which channel? Which thread?
In PingPong, we allowed users to title their threads and create “goals” for conversations, allowing for a greater ability to archive completed conversations. We hoped to use AI to highlight particular phrases of interest in the messaging transcripts.
After a year, PingPong was acquired by a similar company, Grain, that provides smart transcripts for Zoom meetings. It’s been interesting to watch Slack adopt so many features and changes that we toyed with.
In the end, it was a salient idea, but one larger companies were better equipped to bring to market.