Sadly, I have no experience with hardware, so no ideas for the MVP.
I also agree with having one device per group to keep the affordance clear.
After thinking some more about it… I feel ambiguous. Like, groups like “family” and “friends” are best kept on different devices.
But consider the structure of “family”—it is not transitive; the cousins of my cousins are not my cousins. The device would work best if everyone keeps the same definition of the family, but should I ask my cousins to exclude their cousins, just so that I don’t get messages from strangers?
Should I have separate devices for family on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side? I suspect that the answer will be yes… any complication would probably be too complicated for non-tech people. But I don’t feel very sure about that. Multiple devices are also annoying; you have to buy or recharge batteries.
Or maybe (past MVP) the devices should come with two versions? A “non-tech” version, with one device per group. And a “tech” version, with multiple groups per device. Each group has a mute switch—when the group is muted, you won’t even get notification that there is a message in queue.
...anyway, do the one device = one group for MVP, but there may be things to consider later.
Sadly, I have no experience with hardware, so no ideas for the MVP.
After thinking some more about it… I feel ambiguous. Like, groups like “family” and “friends” are best kept on different devices.
But consider the structure of “family”—it is not transitive; the cousins of my cousins are not my cousins. The device would work best if everyone keeps the same definition of the family, but should I ask my cousins to exclude their cousins, just so that I don’t get messages from strangers?
Should I have separate devices for family on my mother’s side, and on my father’s side? I suspect that the answer will be yes… any complication would probably be too complicated for non-tech people. But I don’t feel very sure about that. Multiple devices are also annoying; you have to buy or recharge batteries.
Or maybe (past MVP) the devices should come with two versions? A “non-tech” version, with one device per group. And a “tech” version, with multiple groups per device. Each group has a mute switch—when the group is muted, you won’t even get notification that there is a message in queue.
...anyway, do the one device = one group for MVP, but there may be things to consider later.