6. Pimp Out Your Assets!
• Equity
• Fame: Inclusion in press,
blog entries, etc
• Advisors relationships
• Glory of working on
something awesome
• Adding to their portfolio
• ... Or maybe you're great at
making paper dolls
7. Agree on an MVP
• A single scenario
• High level design goals
• Focus on 3 "Signature Interactions"
• Be brutal in calling out of bounds
Be able to Post a Task in under 30 seconds without typing
8. Design & Development Process
MVP Design MVP
Brainstorming Wireframes User Research
finalized Prioritization Engineering Arguing
submitted
2 weeks 2 months
11. Matrix of Task Options
Task Type Task Buttons
Groceries Run Store Drop off (location) Delivery window
Rabbit Expenses I'll pay
*Restaurant Delivery Restaurant Drop off (location) Deadline
Rabbit Expenses I'll pay
*Donation Pickup Pick up (location) Drop off (location) Pick up time
Rabbit zzzzz
Size/vehicle I'll pay
*Laundry Where Pick up (location) Deadline
Rabbit Expenses I'll pay
Shopping Run Store Drop off (location) Delivery window
Rabbit Amount I'll pay
*Courier Pick up (location) Drop off (location) Delivery window
Rabbit I'll pay
Housecleaning Location Deadline
Rabbit I'll pay
Moving Pick up (location) Drop off (location) Moving period
Rabbit Size/vehicle I'll pay
13. Stakeholders
- 1 Eng - Lead - Lead Mobile
learning iOS Designer/ PM Eng
- Dir of UX - 2 IxD - Lead
- VPE Designers Architects
- Founder
14. Pimp Out Your Assets
Focus on Signature Interactions
1. The Carousel ✔ posting a task
1. Voice recording a description ✔ no typing
1. Histogram of pricing history ✔ < 30 seconds
18. Lessons Learned
• Ensure that all stakeholders are in the room to make key
design decisions
• The best outcomes happen when Design & Dev are pushing
each other's boundaries
• Pimp out your assets!
Editor's Notes
My time at IBM taught great engineering and software dev skills, but lacked designwe made our own forms, icons, buttons, etc. I couldn't tell you who the designer for our team was?
I made a lot of mistakes and early renditions of our platform suffered.Met Janice Fraser, spent some time with her and realized how important UX, IxD, design is.Engineering & design must work together to create amazing things
Why work with 2 agencies and not do it inhouse?- no designer- no iOSdev- wanted to get it launched fast- in the end it gave us a great base to work of off design wise, and in-house engineering talent to lead the teamStory about our mobile projectHow did a small early stage company, with limited $$, get 2 major agencies to work with them on this project.Easy. You just have to think like a pimp.
Think like a pimp. Sure you don't have cash, but what other assets do you have to share?
use those assets!
To start the project, we all had to agree on some high level goals
this is what the design and dev process looked like. just about 10 weeks of work.
started with wireframes to drive user research sessions.begin to focus on key signature interactions
Call out of bounds. there are so many places you can get lost down a rabbit hole. Especially in edge cases or error paths. Stop! Don't do it and keep your focus on the scenario that you are building for MVP
After wire framing and user research, we were at a point where dev could get started with some backend items. we distilled the project into task types and task options.
That's when the work at Pivotal Labs started.
Great thing about pivotal, is that we were able to ramp up an in-house engineer on iOS, who now leads our mobile dev team. It was a good investment for our money.Cooper acting as a PM was also key. Someone needs to be there day to day to make the calls and it shouldn't be a developer.
So we focused on pimping out the assets on the iphone. what were the 3 sig interactions we would focus on? how would they support our high level goals for the project?
best example of design and development converging into something awesome – 2 reasons1 - the actual code involved to make this carousel spin is non trivial. Thanks to Brian our VPE, he spent a full weekend tweaking the trig equations to get this just right. A fun engineering challenge that compliments a useful and gorgeous design.2 –because 1 wedge is out of view, we came up with the idea to be able to dynamically load an infinite amount of tasks into the carousel from the server at any given timeno waiting to submit to the app store to add more task types inbeing able cater the experience depending on the user is also hugely powerfulLESSSON LEARNED- particularly on mobile, push the design and dev boundaries so that you can leverage server infrastructure. what can you make dynamic and not 100% reliant on the visual UI.
The voice recording was tricky technology, and there were a lot of questions that had to be worked out with that flow. How long can the recording be. Can you remove a recording, have multiple recordings, record over an old recording? etc ....
Mobile was the first place we introduced this pricing history. We learned in user research, that this would help people post a task faster, if they knew what other people paid for a task of this same type. We had so much data on pricing that we weren't using, this was a great way to start to leverage that. It has made its way online as well.