Get rid of that damn chat button that appears. Then shakes. Then pops up a fake conversation covering half my screen while I'm trying to read. Seriously, I was interested and that thing just pissed me off.
It's like designers open the startup starter pack and think they have to use all the pieces.
This, I actually closed the site, on mobile the chat pop-up covers the whole screen.
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.
In rare occasions I need to enable JS on a website I start up a browser in a VM. Then I'm reminded how bloody horrible the web can be if fuckwits are given any sharp tool. Yes, I've seen this kind of thing too... thanks, M*sco. No, I don't want to chat.
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.
You can get it from different vendors and the solicitation behaviour is just detracting and horrible. It's understandable from the standpoint of the widget maker if more interactions mean more money, and it's understandable from the standpoint of the web site if they think it gets them more stickiness but what it really does is have an idiot greeter kiddo interrupt their actual sales funnel.
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 security: we do have e2e encryption; if you have a moment, take a look at our security brief under our FAQ https://pragli.com/blog/faq/ and let me know what you feel we should add / how we should display it.
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.
If you are using WebRTC with a centralized SFU, you do not have e2e encryption. If agora is a centralized server for WebRTC multiplexing, please correct your documentation. You are not able to do e2e encryption in the browser using a centralized SFU: it literally does not exist (yet.)
Discord has had Spotify integration for 2 years; I've seen it on multiple people's profiles. They've also added manual statuses in the last year. And app activity isn't limited to games only: go to your settings > app activity, and add any current desktop app (like VSCode).
Hi HN! After selling our first company, my co-founder Vivek and I started working remotely at the acquirer. We discovered we were much more productive than we'd expected, but we struggled with two main issues: communication and loneliness.
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.
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!
Sure thing! A couple keys differences:
1) Avatars - as you mentioned
2) Walkie-talkie - most virtual offices have a call analogy, where you call someone to speak. In Pragli, you don't call - you just jump straight into a conversation, but the other side is muted (to protect their privacy). Here's my blog post on this: https://pragli.com/blog/building-a-walkie-talkie-for-remote-...
3) Some solutions have a very literal office (with a floor plan, etc) - we have a more virtual analogy
4) From what we hear, we have higher quality audio, video, screen share than others (I encourage you to evaluate for yourself)
Hi there - currently, we encourage you to use Pragli alongside a text tool (Slack, Teams, even just email). We will evaluate whether or not it makes sense to build one as we go.
By default, the avatar grays out eventually if you don't interact with your computer, but otherwise is static. You can optionally instruct Pragli to use local facial recognition to move when you move and smile when you smile. Some users really like it and it looks more lively in demos, but FWIW the strong majority of our users are on keyboard/mouse. Here's a blog post I did a while ago about the facial recognition mode: https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/
Nice idea. But I always wonder where it started that pricing is a thing to be hidden.
What does your service cost and why can’t you be open and transparent about this? Not finding the pricing info turned me away instantly.
Pragli is totally free until at least June 1 to be helpful during COVID-19 - we haven't determined our pricing model past then, but it will probably resemble Zoom or Slack (a free tier + a paid tier that's priced per user per month).
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).
It would be nice if this didn't function like a virtual panopticon. Being able to manually set your status, just in case you haven't typed a character on your computer in the last 5 minutes, would be a nice feature to bring back from the dark ages.
Facebook is a very large company that uses lots of tools, and (apparently) encourage some degree of independence between its teams. So it is likely one or a few teams might be using this.
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.
Author here - we put up the logos for companies where members of the company use Pragli. We note in our terms of service that we reserve the right to do this, but we are happy to remove any logos of companies who request not to be used as such.
Interesting approach. Usually logo use is negotiated at purchase time. I'd be interested to see whether you suffer any consequences for playing fast and loose with logos. Might be a profitable way to break the rules like Uber, Facebook, etc.
It's like designers open the startup starter pack and think they have to use all the pieces.