Yammer's Inviting Interface
September 12th, 2008
TechCrunch50 took place earlier this week, and there’s a lot of buzz going on about the start-ups that presented their products there. Yammer is one which is receiving a lot of attention.
It’s basically Twitter for business, restricting the users and messages to the domain of the company. This allows people to answer the dreaded ‘What are you working on right now’ question to everyone at once, not to mention the possibility of creating tags, addressing to specific users and other functionality which mimics Twitter in a good way. We started using it over at 32Bits and the initial impressions are very good.
But my focus here is on how easily the UI guys at Yammer made it for new users to join the service and invite their co-workers. First of all, you only have to fill in a single field, with you work e-mail address, to join.
This form will then send you a confirmation message, as usual, but after that you’re done.
When you’re logged in, the first screen you see is the one below, offering you to invite co-workers to Yammer. I find two very practical things about this list:
- By adding the @domain.com suffix, it’s made clear to the user what input the form expects, without any textual explanation;
- When you get close to the end of the list, more fields are added, so you don’t have to worry about hitting a max (while it allows the designers to keep the default state simple). They use Prototype, but this effect can be easily accomplished with (or without) any JS library.
I wish I could say the UI for their AIR app is also nice, but the color combination is actually almost blinding.
It can’t really be said the interface for Yammer is beautiful, but it’s certainly shows quite some thought has gone into it, and it’s good to see this kind of effort.
Now it’s time to see where how the service does in the future.