Summary
As Lead Interaction Designer for BBM, I was responsible for redesigning the application for the BB10 platform. The challenge involved adopting the new BB10 platform style guidelines, while retaining the "magic" of BBM. We kept the usual stuff that always made BlackBerry Messenger great, like read/read message status, groups, pinging unresponsive contacts, and file sharing.
We introduced a new grid view for scrolling through contacts. This particular decision was debated fiercely within the design group, since there was a concern that users would not take the time to add profile pictures, diminishing the value of the value. However, the desire to personalize and share, influenced heavily through social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook, made this concern a moot point.
An important consideration for the design of BBM was allocating functionality in the chat window in such a way that all key functionality was available while the virtual keyboard was displayed without compromising key real estate. Our final design proposal involved retaining the emoticon key on the right of the text entry field, in keeping with legacy design, but also adding an icon to the left which gave the user access to send functionality.
Another challenge in designing BBM for BB10 was to ensure its seamless integration with other applications, including the Hub. Understanding trigger points for sharing and wanting to start a conversation were important considerations, as well as aligning with sharing protocols required for other applications.
