Tag: operations

Racket 1.0 iOS app

Every team is a remote team

Inspired by the rising popularity of airpods, my partner and I were funded to do a startup called Racket to imagine how hybrid teams could communicate with always-on audio. The idea was to make conversations effortless – with all the spontaneity and serendipity of working in the same space. The solution was to extend the current mode of remote collaboration, messaging, with audio – imagine Slack but if it was multi-modal – long before Slack huddles was launched (and with a better UX). Racket let you listen and talk in text conversations and have synchronous audio conversations in a channel that others could read or listen to later. Seamlessly move between text and voice to fit your context and benefit from the strengths of both asynchronous and synchronous communication. We designed and built out authentication, onboarding, invites, user management, channels, audio playback, audio emoji, and an admin console. Racket was built on WebRTC architecture, and featured multichannel recording for speaker isolation and transcription, smart muting for team members in the same room and a bunch of other novel features. As one of two founders I compiled a massive competitive analysis, designed and specified all the product features, ran QA, and wrote the patent.

Racket 3.0 iOS/Mac apps and brand identity

Lemon, lime, mango and papaya

A pivot for Racket toward productivity, 3.0 was a collaborative canvas and audio communication platform on Mac Desktop and iPhone. In addition to updating existing Racket features, we added synchronization and collaborative collision rules for the canvas, and I contributed hands-on UI design directly in Swift for a number of elements. I gave it a brand design that embodies collaboration through the progression of color and repetition of layers, creates a language of bold simple shapes, evokes the product name with a subtle letter R, and incidentally looks like delicious fruit. A fun and inviting brand that could appeal to both business and consumer users, with key deliverables of an app icon, app store presentation, and desktop/mobile website that mimicked the product UI.