Haptik is a messaging app that connects users to brands. We often describe ourselves as a "Whatsapp for Customer Care", though we go beyond the regular definition of "Customer Care" in many ways. The startup was founded in the fall of 2013, with a private beta launched in October 2013, and a public beta launched on March 30, 2014.

These are a few screenshots.

Our core product was, of course, messaging. The goal behind the design was to keep it simple and as intuitive as possible. Focus was given to getting the typography and spacing right, to ensure long conversations could be easily read.

A key part of our app is being transparent as to who you're chatting with. Besides messaging, we also provided FAQs and contact information. The contact information also allowed me to add a useful little feature: typically, if certain contact information for a brand wasn't available, we'd just tell them so. However, as our product was in fact "customer support", I believed it would be appropriate for us to offer the user to message the company through our service asking for the information.

 

This message was typically auto-typed and sent for them, so all they really had to do was wait for the response.

I've also added several features that take advantage of Android's openness that have given our app unique capabilities. One of them is to catch when a user clicks on a search result for a company's help website while Googling them, at which point instead of taking them directly to their default browser, the user is asked whether they'd like to "Ask on Haptik".

Another is a feature called auto-favorites: we detect which companies a user is a customer of on the basis of their handset, network and the apps they have installed and automatically highlight them, so they don't have to handpick them themselves and get quicker access to them.

Going forward, the app is going through a gradual redesign to meet them Material Design guidelines (a hint of it can be seen in the screenshot above).