I’m currently living in a Northern European one and the income island thing was solved with city planning: the same area has mix of private and city owned apartment buildings. Some buildings are mix-owned too, so city owns like 50% of the apartments.
Here you’m find a person living on social security and someone with half a million apartment loan, having a neighbourly chat while their kids playtogether in the common courtyard.
Great work. As a European designer, really happy to see competition. Figma is slowly jacking up prices and companies are starting to lean on seats.
Figma has pretty much reached the point that they’re inventing features, pushing AI and expanding to other products (figjam, slides), because they’ve reached feature maturity on UI design long time ago and they need to make more money by expanding the other roles (PO, dev) from viewers to paid seats that actually use the tool.
So, you have a good fixed target here for Europeans: keep copying UI features from Figma and get European businesses to start switching over.
Your pricing is way too high.
World’s best UI design tool with all the extra tools? 16€. Your limited offer? 12€!
How about: 16€ ANNUAL. ”For the price of one month of Figma, get Vecti for the whole year.” - there’s a promotion text for the website too.
P.s. My list of must haves before I could consider switching:
- auto layout (w/ slots if possible!!)
- components
- very simple prototyping with click & scroll support
Prototyping is required for user testing, so I’d have to buy software for that if I’d use yours.
Edit:
I want to follow your progress. Could you have a mailing list where you update your feature implementation progress - let’s say once a month?
Re: the features that you mentioned - these are definitely on my list. I thought that getting the product out there sooner was preferable to waiting longer at this stage. But I fully resonate with you, and I’m working on releasing them shortly.
Re: pricing, this is something I gave a lot of thought to, and I came to the conclusion that instead of participating in a race to the bottom, I prefer that the paying customers really see value in my product. I would like to offer a more generous free plan and find the right niche in the design field for those paying customers.
With this in mind, here’s a 50% discount code for any plan, for this community and anyone who would like to support this project: HN50
Re: the mailing list, it’s a great idea. I’ll implement a subscription list soon for the people who are interested. In the meantime, you can send me an email at contact@vecti.com with your email, and you will be the first person to get notified of the product progress.
They won’t see value unless they try. And by lowering price (maybe for a year or two?) you will compete strongly with figma and other design tools. Then you can increase price and see who sees value and who doesn’t.
The brand and presentation seem to try to appeal to (young) tech savvy people; but those are the ones who are hardest to win due to so many different needs they have for their OS and software running on it. Similarly why people don’t move from Windows to Linux.
Thus, I’d be afraid this might very easily end up in the ”toy” category like the many alternative cloud or browser OSes.
So, instead, why not take a chapter from Chromebook’s.. book, and target the users with simplest needs: the non-technical. Those, who just ”need a browser in a laptop”.
New selling points:
- No need to update it, it takes care of its self
- No need to install suspicious apps, it can make the things you need
- No menus full of apps, settings and actions you will never use; only what you actually want
- You can’t break it, it can protect itself from accidents
- Never again odd error messages, it can always explain them to you ELI5 and help to fix them
And lastly:
- Nothing to ”learn” - always just ask and it’ll do it for you
Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.
It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.
Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.
The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.
I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.
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Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:
These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
Here you’m find a person living on social security and someone with half a million apartment loan, having a neighbourly chat while their kids playtogether in the common courtyard.
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