The many faces of tonari’s simplicity 🎭
It might sound like a marketing truism, but there's much hidden in that concise statement. It is the simplest way I've come to understand this unique, mysterious oddball of a product in the three years I've worked on it. While not at all an official slogan, I believe it speaks of the design ethos that makes tonari feel unlike technology, but like magic.
As with most meaningful statements, it's also about what it doesn't say. So if tonari is the connection between two spaces... What is it not?
It's definitely not the time you flush down the swirly vortex of "loading" animations while waiting for a video call to start. It's not your own tired face, staring back from the virtual mirror as you join the daily standup, wondering what whimsical animation to overlay on your messy background. tonari is not the maze of invitations, addresses and links you navigate every day, coffee in hand, in the tedious chase of someone else's time.
No, tonari is none of that. Because all of these things, which we've come to accept as necessary evils of communication, have nothing to do with the connection between two spaces. All of these extraneous elements create friction, and this friction, in turn, draws the spotlight from connecting spaces to connecting people . And when you're connecting people , you inevitably feel the tension associated to holding someone's attention; that awkward silence at the end of a call, that urge to end the meeting early as to not waste your colleague's time, that anxiety about your own appearance.
