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When Quip was first introduced, I was highly skeptical it would be an effective tool for me. I had used Microsoft's Office applications since I was in middle school, and I didn't have a strong desire to learn a new product because I thought offerings like Word and Excel were good enough for me. I didn't want to invest time learning a product that did the same thing as one I was already familiar with. Yet I realized that Quip added a component I didn't have in Microsoft's applications. It added the ability to collaborate.
Quip needs to become adopted by a wider swath of millennials. Staying connected to what friends and colleagues are doing is important to millennials. One only needs to look as far as the high volume of social media users that fall in the millennial demographic to see how connectivity online is valued. Quip serves as this connector for people in the world of projects, articles, and work documents. Though there is a learning period involved when first introduced to Quip, the learning curve that I experienced was not a long one at all. It took me approximately ten minutes to get fully acclimated to the product — and there are a ton of materials online like videos and blogs to learn more. As my use of the product progressed, I discovered more and more of its features. Below are my reasons as to why students college-age and younger need to adopt Quip.
One blessing—and sometimes a curse—with my generation is we like to know what every person is doing allthe time. We love to get deeper insight into how our friends are interacting with the things we do and share. If something great happens, we post about it, and love to know who has seen it, and get feedback via likes and shares. Yet when it comes to documents we collaborate on, we lose the ability to have that visibility. That was, at least, before Quip was created. Quip contains what can be thought of as a social media feed-inspired tool that enables visibility on edits. You can see what time the edits occurred, who did them, and you can type messages commenting on the edits made. When I'm working in school or at my internship, I often have group projects. We use shared documents that everyone has the ability to edit and change. Often times, I'll complete a section and come back later with it looking completely different. I would not have known who edited it unless I go through a tedious and meticulous process of searching recent edits to the document through a search engine that is provided within the document. If the document has been worked on a good amount during the time period I was away from it, it's tough to find the edit I'm looking for. Quip is different. The feed provides visibility to see who performed what edits on the document, and at what time the edits were performed. It tells the story of how the current version of the document came to be. This is important for millennials in school especially because their grade and how they do on assignments directly correlates to understanding the edits that classmates made.
One of Quip's biggest calling card for both millennials and older users is live data synchronization via Quip Connect. Quip enables users to sync reports that change day-by-day and hour-by-hour to its documents. This is important in regards to the ability to complete assignments quicker. For example, I've worked on projects looking at projecting the health of accounts. The health of an account, in terms of what its status is relative to the way its interacting with its product, changes by the minute. Users need applications like Quip to tell accurate stories about the data they have. Quip Connect takes the potential clunkiness that can arise from live data syncing to a document.
Quip's UI is sleeker than its competitors. I've used Microsoft's applications (Word, Excel) since my days in middle school. Quip looks like a modern upgrade to the Microsoft applications I've grown accustomed to. The overall feel of the page screams new in comparison to the bland Microsoft UI. Its design also appears fresh and modern because of how accessible help tools are, which follow you throughout the page. As mentioned above, Quip has the easily accessible communication tools for collaboration, too. The three things millennials are looking for when it comes to work applications' user interface are easily accessible help tools, quick ability to collaborate with their peers, and for the application to not appear old or clunky. Quip's UI checks off all of these things.
I use a host of social media applications in my personal life that have a similar layout to Quip. They feature a notifications tab, where you can see if you have been mentioned by a colleague or if someone has interacted with your profile. This feature is included in Quip, and would be embraced by millennials that can more commonly associate with a social media-inspired interface. If Millennial A wants Millennial B to see a particular video or piece of information, it is much easier for the interaction to occur via mentioning them on Facebook or tagging them in a post then sending an email that could go unread in a cluttered inbox. Quip adopts this type of interaction, something that will seem familiar to millennials that are used to using similar functions on their social media accounts.
Quip has easily accessible tools in place for help when working in the application. Millennials often include pictures, graphs, and spreadsheets in presentations in school or with their internships. Quip lets users use the @ key to create "rich mentions" for other documents or users within the Quip application, or quickly insert other items like photos and files. Quip has help tools located right in the document you're working on. While many current applications have a bar located at the top of the page with all the functions that a user can perform on a section of the document, Quip puts the actions right within the document for easy access.
Much pushback for Quip comes as a direct result of not wanting to put the time and effort to change from what has been used in the past. People expect to find the same features in the same places. The 10 minutes it will take to learn Quip's features will lead to increased productivity down the line. Quip has the features—and more capabilities—of many applications that we use today. There will always be knock-offs on collaboration and helps tools that claim they are the best in regards to promoting productivity on documents. Yet Quip lets me collaborate and create material without possessing a clunky environment or being difficult to work with. A continuous, sleek user interface will serve as an effective platform for millennials to do work, maximizing productivity and collaboration to the fullest in the process. It's the best fit for a millennial like me.
This piece is the first in a series that will be released this summer titled “Re-Think: A Millennial's View On Current Technology.” It will highlight the viewpoints of a millennial who has spent the past three years interning at Salesforce, one of the fastest growing and most innovative technology company in the world. The writer is a current rising senior at New York University's Manhattan campus.
