Improving Wire
The two months since the launch of Wire have been an inspiring experience. We have received a lot of encouraging and constructive feedback and learned quite a bit about your first impressions.
Today is the time to take your thoughts and apply a round of improvements to Wire. I would like to walk you through a few changes you’ll see in the refreshed version of Wire that will be rolling out this week.
First, about the look and feel.
We like Wire’s stark feel, but felt we could improve on having a more unique visual character for each person using Wire. We decided to let the beautiful pictures you have set for your profiles show in full color — each of them is different and unique, this makes Wire look more fresh, vivid and alive.
On to the texts.
One of the most requested things about our conversations has been improvement to legibility and making it easier to follow who said what. We concur. In the updated version, you’ll see a new blurred background to the conversations, adjusted text sizes and better spacing between elements.
These tweaks make reading messages quicker, separate conversation content from the background better and make the layout look more balanced.
Additionally, you’ll also notice a picture of the author next to each message in a conversation. These little talking heads will help you scan conversations much faster.
Then, the interactions.
Our original design principle was to make maximum use of gestures. In our endeavour to make Wire a truly different kind of conversation experience, we introduced an interface that relied only on swipe gestures. You pointed out in certain places relying on swipes alone can be unintuitive.
We have added icons to support the most important tasks of the interface. You can now quickly start new conversations or find existing ones by tapping the plus icon in the conversation list. A group icon at the bottom of the conversation view opens up details about the person or group you are talking to and allows you to add new people. The gestures you may be used to already also work, of course.
What else?
There are numerous design tweaks everywhere in the new version of Wire. Fine-tuned icons, tweaked colors and typography — many details have been honed to make the Wire experience better for you.
And finally, we’ve made several improvements to enhance overall app speed and stability. With your help we have also identified several bugs and are happy to report them fixed.
When can I get it?
We are happy to let you know an updated version of Wire for Android is already available on Play Store.
For iOS and Mac OS X, updated versions of Wire will be submitted this week and released as soon as Apple approves them. Thanks for being patient.
We would like to thank you for giving the app a go and for sending us your questions and suggestions. Please keep them coming.
— Priidu Zilmer, Wire co-founder and designer
