Teehan+Lax - Defining Experience

Roundabout Beginnings

Our relationship with Obvious Corp, began when @ev started following us. It seemed only natural that the founder of Twitter would communicate this way. A few days passed and we got the DM.

It was September of 2011, and that DM quickly led to others where Ev asked if we’d be in San Francisco anytime soon. The following week Geoff Teehan found himself standing outside a most unassuming US Bank building in the city’s Mission district.

The Meeting

We didn’t really know what to expect. There wasn’t an agenda. Just an hour blocked in a calendar for a chat. Ev had hinted that we would talk about what he may be working on next. It was intimidating to meet the guy who is partly responsible for blogging (Blogger) and of course, Twitter.

For a good portion of the meeting we talked about what we did, how we did it, our company structure, who we worked with and what we were working on; We had recently released TweetMag and had a prototype of Readability for iPad that we gave a quick demo of.

The last 20 minutes were spent talking about what Obvious were thinking about. Most of it revolved around the future of publishing. It wasn’t clear to us just yet, but it would be soon enough.

The meeting ended with Ev saying, “Well, it was great to meet you. While I don’t have anything right now, I’m excited at the prospect of finding something to work on together”. A meeting that ends without a next step is usually not a good sign, but it was hard not to be pleased (and thankful) to have spent the time chatting about things we were both passionate about.

A Second Date

A month or so passed and we eventually heard back from Obvious. This time it was about doing some work together.

Geoff and Jon Lax flew out to San Francisco to meet with Jason Goldman and Ev to hear more about what Obvious was doing and how Teehan+Lax might be able to help.

In the meeting, they explained they were exploring ideas around publishing platforms. They had been building this new product for a few months. It was incredibly sophisticated and complex and had taken on a few forms already, none of which felt quite right.

They wanted to try something new. It didn’t need to be a full working product, a prototype would suffice. Ev believes product decisions need to be made from actual usage. Even though we wouldn’t be building a fully working product, this prototype would give them a better sense if their new product idea was worth pursuing further.

Jason came to Toronto for 2 days and we began roughing out the prototype. For the next two months we worked on designing and building out various approaches. We had weekly contact with Obvious. We were working on this like a traditional client: Sprints of work presented on a weekly basis for feedback.

Sometimes we’d just build small elements of an interface, like a new take on a scrollbar. Other times, we were exploring completely new interfaces for consuming long-form content. These prototypes allowed us to see things in one of two ways: Things that don’t work, and things that need work.

Just before Christmas of 2011 we wrapped up the prototype. The guys at Obvious thanked us for the work and that was that.

Through the new year we waited. We watched the Obvious site, Twitter, TechCrunch and others, expecting to hear an official announcement related to what we had built. Nothing appeared.

This is always difficult for us. Doing work that we can't talk about, unsure if it will appear online or end up on the cutting room floor. All we could do was wait.

Contact

In April of 2012, Ev emailed Geoff again and said he wanted to discuss working together in a closer, more collaborative way. In the 4 months since we worked on the prototypes, Obvious had been busy. They had built something they referred to as, Medium. They had real code, a working product and a desire to ship something.

We flew back out to San Francisco. Obvious had moved into a beautiful office overlooking Market Street. There were twice as many people and they were very focused on building Medium.

There weren’t many traces of our prototype in Medium, but that was pretty understandable—it had evolved into a very different product. Ev explained that he felt there was a need for meaningful writing on the Web. There wasn’t a place for people who wanted to write something more substantive than a tweet. Blogs, while better for long-form, required a certain savviness to get up-and-running. Successful ones required constant care and feeding and typically focussed on a single subject matter. New ones lacked an audience. He went on to say that people sometimes just have one thing to say about a subject, not something every day or week. This is what Medium would solve for.

He wanted us to provide a team that would be integrated with the Medium team to help design the product. At the time, there were 3 designers; Dustin Senos, Leigh Taylor and Dann Petty. Dustin was doing double-duty as a developer and designer while Dann and Leigh focused on design. Ev had built out an amazing engineering team but needed design help, which is where we came in.

This would be unlike a typical client. It wasn’t the type of project we could just go back to Toronto with and work in isolation on like the prototype. We needed to become part of the Obvious team. Logistically, this was concerning and challenging for both of us. After lengthy discussions we agreed on the following approach: