The demands for collaboration driven productivity and efficiency are encouraging more and more companies to invest in platforms that promise to enable the most effective collaboration. The market is already crowded and the biggest players are well established. Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark and Slack already control a good share of the market although this is not preventing new players targeting them and the remaining space.
Doist are a company focused on the remote user market and aim to improve productivity and reduce stress for end users. In June 2017 they launched their own communication application, Twist. We spoke to Head of Twist, João Valente, to find out more about Twist and how they hope it can offer something new to the collaboration market, as well as a new perspective on the collaborative workplace as a whole.
“Twist’s mission is to help remote-friendly teams cultivate a more organized, transparent, and balanced workplace.”
Although many of the existing collaboration applications seem to overlap each other in terms of goals and functions, Twist approach this from a different angle. One of the fundamental purposes of collaboration platforms should be to enable more simplistic communication between end users and boost their productivity and efficiency. Twist argue that the more established players have set about achieving this from the wrong direction.
“We’re up against heavy-weight opponents like email– a decades old, totally ubiquitous, and totally dysfunctional, work method, and the 24/7, always-on culture perpetuated by popular group-chat apps like Slack. Doist is making bold assumptions about team communication and we’re confident that Twist is the ideal solution for modern, remote-friendly teams.”
Twist has been designed by Doist to be the antithesis of the chaos and clutter found in chat tools and email chains. They maintain that real time messaging for teams is not the best way of enabling efficiency and boosting end user productivity. The less time spent in Twist, the better.
Doist want teams to focus on deep work and then disconnect to enjoy a more healthy work-life balance. They aim to enable this using a number of more innovative design features. The core of Twist is based around thread-first communication and threaded conversations to ensure that whole conversations full of ideas, issues, answers, and decisions stay focused around that topic.
Truly transparent conversations enable teams to browse all topics to get an overview of the discussions happening in the company as a whole, and deep dive into anything that interests them or that they can add value to. This enables users to quickly get up to speed on what’s going on and better understand team culture by having a full insight into all the companies discussions. There is also no online presence indicator, a feature which has become ubiquitous with all communication tools. Twist suggest this will ensure teams collaborate all the time. Without a presence indicator a team will have to adapt to add comments or send messages whenever they need to as they will have no way of knowing if the person is online or not.
Twist realise that a shift in ideology will be required for their application to fully achieve its goals.
“It’s going to be a long, uphill battle. Calm, asynchronous communication isn’t the norm. It’s going to take a major shift in thinking to recognize that focus and balance are vital assets that companies need to protect in order to be successful. We’re betting that in the future, the most successful companies will be the ones who make that shift.”
Twist represents a really interesting new approach to collaboration which has been developed to remedy some of the perceived shortcomings within the existing market provision. We can only wait and see if there are enough forward thinking organisations who agree that Twist’s new angle is the right one.
