Designing Navigation for 17 Apps Instead of One
A cross-app launcher solves a different design problem than a redesigned single-app nav — and it's worth being specific about which problem it actually solves, and which one it doesn't yet.
Navigation design for a single app and navigation design for a suite of 17 apps are different problems, not the same problem at a different scale. A single app's nav is about organizing screens within one product. A suite's nav is about letting someone move between distinct products without losing their place, their context, or their patience — and the design decisions that solve the first problem don't automatically solve the second.
The design tension, made concrete
Two large platforms with the same underlying problem — many apps, one identity — have visibly chosen different models, and the difference is instructive rather than cosmetic. Google Workspace uses an app-grid launcher: a single icon that opens a grid of app tiles, a deliberately lightweight, infrequent-use pattern — you open the grid, pick an app, and it closes behind you. Microsoft 365 instead uses a persistent left-rail app bar, always visible, always one click away, treating app-switching as frequent enough to deserve permanent screen real estate rather than a menu you open and close.
Notion sidesteps the problem differently: rather than building 17 separate apps that need a switcher between them, it builds one canvas and lets pages, databases, and views live inside that single surface. There's no app-switching problem to solve because there's structurally one app. That's a legitimate answer, but it's a different bet — it trades the specialization of purpose-built apps (a CRM that's actually a CRM, not a database template arranged to look like one) for the simplicity of never needing to leave a single surface.
Piskes's own situation is closer to Microsoft's than Google's or Notion's: 17 genuinely separate, purpose-built apps — not templates inside one canvas — where switching between them is a routine, not an occasional, action. Someone moving from a CRM record to drafting a follow-up email to checking a related task is switching apps multiple times inside a single piece of work, not once a day.
What was actually built, and why that model
The app switcher that shipped is a cross-app launcher — reachable from anywhere in the suite, built for the "I'm in the CRM and need to jump to email" motion that happens constantly rather than rarely. That's closer to Microsoft's always-available model than Google's infrequent-use grid, which follows from the usage pattern: if switching is frequent, hiding it behind an extra click every time is a real cost across a day, not a rounding error.
What this doesn't solve — and shouldn't be assumed to
It's worth being precise about what the app switcher actually moves between, because it's easy to conflate two different things that sound similar. The switcher moves between apps within one workspace — CRM to email to tasks, all still inside the same organization's account. It does not move between separate workspaces. If someone belongs to two different organizations' Piskes accounts — a consultant working across two clients, say — switching from one workspace's context to the other's is a different, currently unbuilt capability. That gap is real and worth naming rather than letting a reader assume "app switcher" quietly covers workspace-switching too, because it doesn't.
Why the distinction is worth making explicit
A design decision described vaguely — "we built a way to move between apps" — invites the reader to fill in scope themselves, and they'll often fill it in more generously than what's actually true. Being specific that this is an intra-workspace app launcher, not an inter-workspace switcher, is a more useful description for anyone actually trying to figure out whether it solves their situation: someone juggling CRM, email, and tasks inside one organization gets exactly what they need today; someone juggling multiple separate client workspaces is describing a real, distinct gap that hasn't been closed yet.