IBM Sametime

My aim with Sametime was to shape how enterprise chat could work in a new era of touchscreens and constant connection. The challenge was to preserve what users trusted about the desktop app while translating it into an experience that felt fluid, tactile, and unmistakably modern.

It was originally created in the late 1990s, long before mobile operating systems or app stores existed.

As mobile devices became essential to daily work, customers wanted the same real-time communication they had on desktop, but without the friction of switching tools. The expectation was clear: Sametime needed to work anywhere, on any screen, with the same dependability it always had.

Years of desktop features had to be rethought for touch interactions and limited space. Each operating system had its own conventions, and those patterns were still taking shape.

There was also a pressing business concern. Customers were frustrated by the lack of mobile options, and when early versions felt cumbersome, many employees turned to unapproved tools like SMS to stay connected. That shift introduced security risks for organizations that relied on Sametime for internal communication.

The goal was clear. Sametime needed native mobile versions that were as easy to use as consumer apps, yet met the security and reliability standards that enterprises required. At the same time, tablets such as the iPad added unexpected complexity. They offered more real estate than the desktop clients used, which forced us to rethink how context and space could work together.

• Reviews in both app stores were positive (4.3 stars in the iOS App Store, 4.4 stars in the Google Play Store).
• Customers were relieved to finally have a mobile messaging experience that worked within their security infrastructure.
• Users praised how naturally the app fit into their day-to-day workflow.
• 40% increase in WCAG 2.1 compliance.

The largest challenge of working on IBM Sametime for iOS and Android was translating a product that customers had been using on their desktops for almost a decade into a new form factor on new OSes with a completely different design language. IBM Sametime 8.5.2 was released for iOS 3 and Android 3. The version numbers are coordinated with the desktop versions to avoid customer confusion, so while this was version 8.5.2, it was one of the first mobile releases.

In this release, the most used features of IBM Sametime were added, including the contacts and favorites lists with presence information, one on one chat capabilities, and user profiles. For business reasons, it was essential to get this release shipped as quickly as possible, so for the sake of expediency, this release primarily followed the iOS and Android platform standards of the time.

In these explorations, active chats appeared as a stack of documents that users could move through freely. When a buried chat received a new message, it responded with a subtle movement or a brief color change, giving a quiet sense of activity without interrupting focus.

In presenting the conversations in this manner, the aim was to give the user a better feel for how many chats they have going. In a similar manner to how chats are visually treated as documents, viewing your chat history with a contact would also surface them as a collection of cards:

Expanding on the idea of representing chats as documents and cards, a further exploration enabled the user to use a pinch gesture to shrink all of their active chats down to profile pictures to view in a grid. This allows for an at-a-glance view of active chats as well as quick switching between them.

This concept worked by having every “level” of the navigation represented by a card that would slide in over its parent view. In this example, “Operations” is a third-level group, with each parent group represented by a sliver of the card to show navigational depth.

Sametime 9 also introduced video conferencing to the app. While it is possible to use video conferencing full screen, the default position of the video conference view is beside the conversation, allowing participants to talk to one another via video, but also share content via the chat at the same time.