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How Alicent Builds Product

Alicent is dedicated to delivering software that's crafted with precision, designed for elegance, and engineered to redefine market standards.
Welcome to the Alicent blog, where we delve into the intricacies of our product development process. Our mission is simple: to create blazingly fast interfaces that are both intuitive and efficient. Let's break down the technical tactics that allow us to deliver on that promise.

Super-Fast Interfaces: The 10ms Click Response Goal

Speed is the cornerstone of the Alicent experience. We've set an ambitious goal for ourselves: every click should elicit a response in under 10 milliseconds. This is no easy feat, but we achieve it through meticulous design and a rigorous caching strategy.
To combat the speed limitation of light itself, we ensure that everything is cached in memory or local storage. The first time you query our server for data, it's promptly fetched and then cached locally. Subsequent requests for these objects are lightning-fast because they're pulled directly from local storage.
When you interact with our UI, you'll notice the immediate response from the local version of your data. A subtle indicator—a small tick—appears to let you know when the server version has been retrieved and the data is fully up-to-date. This approach keeps you informed and ensures that the interface feels responsive at all times.
To instill this performance-oriented mindset in our development process, we've introduced a random delay to every server request in our development environment. This constant reminder pushes our developers to optimize for speed and to consider the cache-first strategy from the outset.

User Experience: Harnessing Familiarity and Attention to Detail

Our commitment to user experience at Alicent is about leveraging the familiar while refining it to perfection. We're not here to reinvent the wheel; instead, we use the most common UI elements that our users are already accustomed to. This familiarity reduces the learning curve and allows users to interact with our platform more naturally.
But familiarity doesn't mean we're complacent. Every feature is crafted with the utmost attention to detail, ensuring that every interaction is intuitive and every workflow is streamlined. Here are a couple of examples that illustrate our dedication to intuitive design:
  • Drag and Drop: In our platform, drag-and-drop functionality behaves exactly the way you expect. Whether you're reorganizing documents within a single window, transferring items from one window to another, or moving a document to pin it in the tab bar, the action is seamless and straightforward. We've engineered these interactions to feel natural and to work consistently across the entire platform, reducing friction and enhancing productivity.
  • Hyperlinks: Every link within the Alicent app behaves just as it should on the web. You can open links in new tabs using your system's methods, such as holding down the 'Ctrl' key while clicking or right-clicking to select 'Open link in new tab' from the context menu. This adherence to web standards ensures that users can navigate the app with the same shortcuts and behaviors they're already familiar with, providing a smoother and more predictable experience.
By focusing on these familiar aspects of user interaction, we ensure that our users spend less time learning the software and more time leveraging its capabilities to enhance their work. This attention to detail is part of what sets Alicent apart and why our users trust us to deliver a product that not only meets their needs but does so with an elegance that feels like second nature.

Final Thoughts: The Product Engineering Mindset

At Alicent, we operate with a small, agile team that embodies the product engineering mindset. Our team members wear multiple hats, blending design, development, infrastructure, and more. This cross-functional approach ensures that we're always aligned with our core objectives and that we can move swiftly from concept to execution.
In conclusion, the Alicent product is the result of a relentless pursuit of speed, a commitment to user-centered design, and a practical approach to feature development. We're dedicated to building a product that not only meets the expectations of today's knowledge workers but exceeds them, providing an experience that is as fast as it is intuitive. Join us on our journey to redefine productivity and discover why Alicent is the future of document creation.

Petri Martinmäki

16 Mar 2024

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