It's like designers open the startup starter pack and think they have to use all the pieces.
It's like a waitor asking if you are ready to order before you've opened the menu, but the waitor then stands there and covers the menus with their hands,and waits for you to ask them to move their hands.
The problem here is a symptom. The real problem is lack of usability testing - stick it in front of users (not your staff, who will a) already be familiar with it and b) will tell you what you want to hear so it won't annoy the boss and get themselves called a troublemaker). A little genuine testing will show up these problems rapidly. You've just got to put aside your ego and love of cute things, and asks what the customer genuinely wants... oh dear, that sounds like hard work. Never mind. As you were.
Communication friction came primarily from the endless back and forth in Slack / text communication. On the other hand, scheduling a Zoom meeting felt very heavyweight.
Loneliness came more slowly, but speaking to people less often definitely affected my happiness and productivity.
As a result, we built Pragli, a virtual office for remote teams.
In Pragli, you customize your appearance with an avatar and then can hop into audio rooms with one click. Video and screen share are optional.
When you're focusing or other unavailable, you can manually set a status, or automatically set a status via our Spotify and calendar integrations.
FWIW, TechCrunch describes Pragli as "BitMoji for the enterprise." https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/14/pragli-remote-office-appli...
You do have to sign up with Google, Microsoft, or Github OAuth, but there are no additional hurdles beyond that, you are dropped right into a team. You also have the option to skip downloading the desktop app and play with it in the web.
I'm here to answer any questions. Let me know what you think!
BTW, I never used virtual workspace software. I might not have the problem that you're solving as your potential users
Given the current situation with Zoom, it may help increase trust on HN if you can add information about if you use E2E encryption and delays and location of servers and if its a centralized or de-centralized architecture etc.,
Looks like the feature set perfectly fits the usecase for remote teams, but using something along side Slack like apps, people may feel the friction since Slack itself consumes too much memory among other things. Going around multiple apps itself is a pain. I see that you have them linked through Slack apps.
As an alternative, I personally feel Discord to be a Slack's better version. Discord is used by mainly by gamers around the globe to voice chat during online games. Discord has Pragli + Slack combined - threaded conversations.
Re Discord: I'm a gamer so I understand why you like it. Where I feel Discord is lacking in the workplace is that it only shows if you're playing a game, and it doesn't build any more sense of availability beyond that. It doesn't have the same auto-status / Spotify / manual status that we built into Pragli. It does for games (shows if I'm playing some game) but not for work.
https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000016721...
https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36003540753...
I always take this kind of listing with a big grain of salt, because "company uses X" does not mean "company uses X in the majority of cases/primarily".
Don't get me wrong, the lists are fine, they are just a bit less meaningful than what marketing copies want to lead you to understand.
Cheers
Pragli is totally free until at least June 1. At some point, we will implement a free-forever tier + paid tier. We aren't sure what the pricing for the paid tier will be, but it will probably look like Slack / Zoom ($ per user per month).
