#quibb

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Meet Sandi MacPherson: Founder of Quibb

Meet Sandi MacPherson: Founder of Quibb

The story of the tech startup founded in a garage has been frequently told. I came across an endearing story of a solo-entrepreneur working on an innovative news and link sharing startup in the Bay Area. The person is Sandi MacPherson, a former climate change scientist and the company is Quibb. What is endearing is how she actually met in person and…

I'm still going through my old Wordpress blog and salvaging snippets of thoughts from pre-2014. Here's a short one I jotted down after a chat with Quibb founder Sandi MacPherson:

A community needs to:

1. Start small and be invitation-only first

A curated audience, intentional participation. These folks create the norm for what it means to be part of it. It starts small and grows big slowly.

2. Have an interaction element and reputation structure

On Quibb, people vote. You gain reputation points by having more upvotes.

3. Have a purpose for being

On Quibb, it’s to curate the top links worth reading each day. The focus (at least for now) is on the startup community and anything that affects your work there.

4. Have recurring events to rally around

Think AMAs on reddit or We Are New York Tech and the monthly New York Tech Meetup.

5. Fit with your flow and needs

From a tactical perspective, it is seamless. It fits into the user’s life easily, what they want and when they want it. Email summaries of links are sent at the end of the business day, when people have time to read. There’s a mobile app and Chrome extension to easily share articles to Quibb when you are reading them.

6. Bring value to the members

Paid memberships, reddit gold. There’s value extracted from being part of a community.

7. Support relationships

Quibb is hands down one of my favorite products in the news / content / professional space. It’s a content-sharing network for professionals that lets you share what you’re reading for work and engage with other coworkers and industry professionals. I’ve been using Quibb since it first launched and have found the content, community, and discussion to be incredibly valuable. I’ve met several Quibbers in person since joining and I’m super excited to see Sandi continue to work on it.

One area I’d love to see fleshed out further is the Quibb mobile app. I consume a lot of content on mobile, but rarely open the Quibb app given its limited functionality and design. My guess is Sandi’s focus has been more on refining content curation and membership flows, which would explain why Quibb’s app has been dormant for quite a bit compared to the desktop product. So I decided to take a stab at it.

Full project link on Behance, here.

There are two areas I focused on in my initial design exploration of Quibb for iOS: commenting and bookmarking.

Commenting

One of Quibb’s core strengths is the quality of its discussion threads: they are more in-depth than Twitter, less noisy than LinkedIn groups, and better engaging than comment threads on many of the sites these articles are originally published on. Since discussions are what make Quibb most valuable to me, I wanted to privilege commenting in a way Quibb’s current mobile design does not. I created several CTAs to comment and redesigned the commenting screen to make it easier to return to conversations over time. Because a lot of the content on Quibb stays relevant for months and not just days, it was important to add visual markers to highlight original posters, your own comments, and have the ability to more easily toggle through discussion history. I also added the ability to share these thought-provoking discussions with your network.

For posting, my goal was to keep commenting feeling lightweight and fast, almost like a messaging app. Quibbers still have the option of writing long responses, but the redesign encourages them to also contribute a shorter (still thoughtful!) comment while on the go. That felt more appropriate for mobile than a large blank screen.

Bookmarking

This one’s a no brainer for a content app. I added the ability to bookmark articles and discussions. Even better if these are cached to read later without relying on a network connection.

Other features I’d like to see included:

Search by topic (comments or discussions)

In-app settings (push, email, etc)

Profile access, editing, and inclusion of things like “Articles you’ve commented on/Previous discussions”

Swipe to bookmark or remove from feed in one gesture

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