Headquartered in Mountain View, CA with R&D in Shanghai, China, Vibin was founded May, 2013 by Jonathan Li, a seasoned entrepreneur and interaction designer who designed the first few generations of touch screen mobile phones for Motorola. Vibin is focused on building the world’s simplest way to use the Internet. The Vibin app is meant for those who use their smart phones to capture notes, take photos, read news from Twitter, and/or stay in touch through Facebook. While they are able to perform these tasks, they are not happy with the current state of having to jump in and out of apps to do so. They are also not happy with how complicated their apps have become. Designed for the touch screen, the Vibin app uses a card based metaphor that the user navigates with a few basic thumb gestures – swipe cards up/down to browse, left to save, and right to share. The interaction design is cognizant of how screens are growing in size and is thus optimized for one thumb operation.

The majority of the world accesses the Internet through their mobile phones. However, due to a growing feature set, phones and their apps are growing in complexity. Fortunately phones are equipped with a touch screen, providing an opportunity to reduce user interaction complexity. When the top most popular apps are analyzed, most apps address only one to two of three fundamental user behaviors – browsing, capturing, and sharing information. As a result, users often need to use multiple apps. The Vibin app utilizes a virtual card based approach to provide an intuitive, easy way to read, write, and manipulate data from the Internet. Designed specifically around browsing, capturing, and sharing information, Vibin is able to offer the same functionality in one app that previously required multiple apps. Vibin’s goal is to build the simplest way to access the Internet from your phone. While we have plans to further simplify things, we feel that Vibin deserves a UX award for already delivering an experience that makes the Internet bite-sized, tangible, and ultimately more usable.