At frog, we sometimes use instant messaging to communicate with colleagues and friends, offering quick project updates or coordinating lunch plans. We love the speed and simplicity of this interface – yet have often found its design lacking. Too many chat windows clutter our desktops, visually distracting from other pursuits. Options for customization seem limited to that tiny, static icon in the corner, intended to represent us each within a cubic centimeter. Messaging standards needed to be reexamined.

So when Yahoo! wanted to create a next-generation version of its instant messaging client, we were eager to take the opportunity to make this communication better – with the more engaging, more beautiful, and more streamlined feature sets we had always imagined.

Rather than rely purely on our own experience, the frog team conducted close analysis of consumer use and competitors’ products to identify best-in-class feature sets and potential areas for improvement. We found that all the major entities offered the same core messaging features: a list of contacts and icons, pure chat and video contact options, and profile information.

frog and Yahoo! began brainstorming ways to improve upon these fundamental requirements. The company needed to balance on-screen presence with ease of use, so that users like us could get more personal enjoyment and less visual distraction from the online communications experience.

Through a rapid-fire creative phase, we created an interface design that places visual emphasis on the aspects of communication users care most about: their friends and their conversations, rather than the toolbars menus and interface elements that are standard in most instant messaging applications. We crafted a tabbed interface that allows users to toggle between multiple conversations within a single window, saving precious screen space for other activities. The window was also restructured to make conversation more natural by presenting text within a continuous column, like a newspaper instead of a spreadsheet. Text size, generally locked-in by messaging services, can be enlarged for visibility and accessibility, fostering more comfortable communications. Every feature was refined for ease and user satisfaction.

The interface itself is highly dynamic and visually enticing. frog took advantage of WPF technologies to allow users to zoom in on their contact list with a simple movement of the mouse. The list also identifies friends automatically from a user’s other activities at Yahoo!, then creates a rich experience of online communication, with avatars who expand beyond the frame of the text window and playfully interact with screen elements during chat. Favorite contacts can be saved in the Vista Sidebar, so that even when the contact list is closed, users can keep track of their closest friends. All animations occur smoothly throughout the experience. Furthermore, the window itself can be customized by color and theme using a dynamic new tool that spins swatches of possible hues for the user to select. This customization tool offers a potential platform for advertising, as well, whereby sponsors could brand their own application skins for user selection.

Developers from frog and Yahoo! worked in tight collaboration throughout the project. frog’s technology team built and refined the entire user-interface layer of the application, while Yahoo! developers moved ahead with the functional service layer. This process of overlapping work streams enabled the application to be built in a dramatically shorter timeframe than possible in the traditional software process.

Public release is expected later this year. We’ll be online.