16 MayAbout Dooey
We’re spoilt for choice when it comes to communication, and thanks to the explosion of instant messaging in recent years, most of us are chatting via our smartphones on a daily — even sometimes hourly — basis. Whether that’s about weekend plans with friends or family, or discussing projects with colleagues during work hours, there’s a plethora of ways we can connect: Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram messenger, Slack, Skype, the list goes on.
The problem here is that many of us are using multiple apps to talk about specific things with different friends and/or colleagues. This fragmented way of communicating over so many different platforms makes speaking to everyone a task in itself. The lines between our social and work lives are blurring, we’re seeing our friends and colleagues merging in our contacts lists across these different platforms. It’s therefore increasingly hard to keep work and social chat separate.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the divide back between these two parts of your life?
Well that’s all about to change! We’ve launched an app that brings these two worlds together, while at the same time allowing you to manage the communication in your social and work lives separately, all without the need to switch between applications. Welcome Dooey — our brand new iOS application and the world’s first messaging app created to simplify the lives of mobile users by bringing their work and social communications to one place.
Available in the App Store today, Dooey (dooeyapp.com) is a free messaging app with the aim of providing a clear alternative to email and linear messaging platforms in our business and social lives.
Thanks to investment from myself, Hedgehog Lab and grant funding from Scottish Enterprise, Dooey was born from the idea that nothing has really changed in messaging since SMS. Apart from its data delivery method, messaging is generally still linear, and really not very productive. Dooey brings a dynamic and effortless solution to a problem you may not have realised until now; that conventional messaging isn’t very conducive for fluid conversation.
Branching: the new way to chat
Current messaging — and in particular group messaging — can sometimes feel like you’re talking via a walkie-talkie because only one person can talk at one time about one subject. With Dooey, we bring you to the table, where you’re free to speak as a group or in smaller groups, and can have multiple conversations without really missing out on what interests you. We’re pretty confident we’ve achieve this with our ‘branching’ feature, an innovative navigation solution that allows our users to easily find their way through a conversation keeping it intuitive and manageable.
Branching allows users to break-away from the standard vertical, linear conversations we see in other messaging apps by allowing users to continue a conversation on an alternative topic in a separate, but connected chat box. This allows for expansion on specific points within conversations that might need a little more attention. For example, if two users in a group chat of four are talking about football, those two users can “branch” off into a separate conversation within the same chat box and revisit this “sub-branch” at any time, without disturbing the flow of the main thread.
By eradicating the need for various different chats for different topics, the branching feature streamlines your communications. This is particularly useful in business as it gives teams a clear overview of how a project is progressing. As a project grows, different departments can branch off and keep their scope separate from others, allowing them to communicate more efficiently in smaller groups while other aspects of the project progress in parallel.
Dooey gives you control. Users can decide which contacts they add to each section of the app. While the social side gives users a space to chat freely to friends and family, the business side will only be visible to chosen work contacts. By managing contacts in two separate camps, users can keep a work life balance. Work contacts are easily importable and manageable into your business profile, too, and if you really want to, you have the option to add them as a social contact as well.
But now it’s time for you to give it a try. Get your branches on and tell us what you think! @dooey_official