09
Mar 11
Week 22
Now, that was a week. We did it. We shipped. You don’t get to do that entire thing, from first chat to spinning up a dozen EC2 instances to cope with *blush* sudden popularity very often.
Artfinder is now live, go take a look. Go on, now – i’ll still be here in a few minutes.
There’s an official blog too at blog.artfinder.com where I will be periodically writing about design, feature and product issues. I’m going to write this one here first to try and collect my thoughts on our process and strategy.
Obviously we’re trapped in the classic startup dilemma of Time vs Resources vs Quality and I would like to talk about the choices we made and why.
Firstly there’s Time, and you may tell from the notes on this blog, and the gap between week 3 and week 19, that we didn’t move quite as fast as we originally hoped. But, at the end of last year we made a plan and we stuck to our dates* which was essential for us. First mover advantage is, in case, critical.
The second part of that equation is Resources, and it goes without saying we are streamlined to the extreme. On the design side it’s been just me so far, although we have an outstanding designer joining us soon. London has become extremely tight for exceptional design talent right now. Feels bubbly.
So with two parts of the equation fixed rigidly, we had to flex a little on Quality. We’ve made choices about features, implementations and shortcuts that have been difficult, but I completely stand by. It was only 4 weeks ago when we had a beta I could test in front of friends and family, with guidance on missing bits and known problems. Only did the iteration 2 weeks before launch did many of the elements fit together for the first time. Truly lean.
We’re very proud of what we’ve shipped, and the vast majority of positive comments has been very moving, but we’re extremely aware of many problems with it.
As designer and product manager I second this quote by Reid Hoffman, “If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.” (Incidentally, Reid is an investor in Artfinder.)
How has this manifested itself?
“feature x is unpolished” – I agree, we’ve launched with the absolute minimum in place, the minimum of complex code (especially ajax and javascript visual effects) and the minimum user messaging. Are we going to add these missing layers? Of course, and as soon as possible.
“feature y is unclear” – From the feedback we sought during earlier, private, betas we agonised over some of the placement, naming and function of some features. Did we get it right? Certainly not, and we’ll continue to agonise over them until we do.
“feature z is missing” – The feature list of doom is massive, we picked out the ones we felt essential to convey what the Artfinder concept is about. The ones we did implement, we cut to the bone. For example collections – at launch *extremely* limited (you can see 8 artworks! No delete!) but have plans on how the next, next next, and later iterations expand on this.
“content x is missing or inaccurate” – We know, we’re working on it, the copyright issues we face are considerable but we think by being open, positive and doing the right thing we can include the work everyone wants to see while respecting living artists rights, as well as those deceased but still in copyright. More people seeing art they fall in love with = everyone wins, we think.
And that, is what it’s all about. My philosophy to UX, if I have one, would be best summed up as “Get the groove right, the beats will follow”
* Actually we shifted it by a day – we were one of the launch partners using the new Facebook comments system, and they rescheduled so we all went live on the 1st March together.
12
Feb 11
Week 20
Last note I did a minor reveal of the logo I’d designed for #newstartup, or rather Artfinder. Since then we have quietly come out of the shadows. Well not that quietly – this namecheck in a speech by the arts minister was slightly unexpected while this piece in the Observer was. We have a page where you can drop us an email and we’ll give you first dibs at our beta, which is extremely soon now. Artfinder.com
I thought I’d take this weeknote to post some more of the sketches and development as to how we got the logo we settled with. (With a little help from Bernie Pochon, great designer trading as Qualia Lab who worked on a bunch of sketches when I got stuck. ) I’m not going to annotate these, suffice to say I got a bit stuck on using frames, quite loved the modern Q ish square one for a while and spent way too long fiddling with an ‘rt’ ligature.
22
Jan 11
Week 17 ish
I’m restarting weeknotes! I stopped because I was working on exciting new stuff for our startup, but we were having to be a tiny bit quiet about things and i was bound to say too much. I dislike the ‘stealth’ term for startups, because we are not ninjas or bombers. But sometimes you do have to be a little bit discrete about things, for a short time at least. The last posts were talking about developing our logo, but without revealing the end result it felt a bit pointless. So, a pause.
Now, we’re beginning to emerge blinking into the sunlight. Days are feeling large, the office is buzzing and filling up rapidly. We have done a ton of work in a few different directions (too many at once? Hmm – almost…) but we’re almost there with a one-point-oh. Beta. We have data, we have a website, we have a publishing platform. We have a lot to do.
So not to leave it hanging, here’s a developer job ad, on githubjobs.
And here’s a logo or two.
Artfinder logos
Left we have a reactive logo, that uses colour frequency analysis of your recently viewed content to visualise ‘your’ logo. On the right we have the vanilla.
Enough revealed for this week. More, next.
21
Oct 10
Week 3
I left the cliffhanger in Week 1 struggling with the logo. After much revision, including the standard false “ah, this is it” moments at least twice, we got there. (Sorry it took so long team!) I will unveil as soon as I am able (couple of weeks probably) but I think we struck a balance between obviousness and subtlety.
Nicely it lets us do some interesting customisation based on user activity, clearly inspired by the ace Dopplr http://blog.dopplr.com/2007/10/23/in-rainbows/ ‘sparklogo’ that changes with cities visited and building on work from /dev/fort4 performing colour frequency analysis on content the user sees. Look at pictures of blue skies and the logo will start reflecting that, dive into something else and primary colours might become prominent.
Ah, you’ll get it when you see it.
03
Oct 10
Week 1
What?
I’m hitting the reset button the weeknote counter because technically my extended run of designer-at-large amongst you has come to an end. I’ve signed an employment contract, have a desk in an actual office and a list of tasks all for one company. Shit got real, as I imagine the kids say.
We’re going to be a wee bit hush for a few weeks yet, but only a few as I think we’re looking at three or four products out and proud by end of the year at a minimum. Fast, good, cheap – we picked the first two.
So I talked about doing some wireframes and mockups for iPad apps before, these are ongoing. In the gaps I’ve been doing logo designs for company. Man, I forget how hard this stuff is. Doing a tweak or refresh of something existing I’ve done a few of, but from scratch only two or three. You try to conjour up all your hopes, ideas, messages into as few strokes as possible. Oof, proper Hard.
It continues.
App of the week: updated Remote, now for iPad. Pretty nice, playing this tune from here on that thru the big speakers using this. Sweet.
14
Sep 10
Week 509
Avoiding the effects of the darkness of winter at the moment, while chugging through a second round of wireframes and designs for new project, after excellent spiralling design/feature/detail chat with Norm & James. That’ll get a bit easier soon I think with a permanent space.
Last week was quite large, or felt that way, beginning with a chunky bit of mockup design completed to show off an iPad concept – fairly straightforward actually, don’t want to scare the horses just yet. Following that with a busy presentation day and arrival of inlaws to stay for a few days.
This week, we have our first all-hands in an actual office space too – fast moving (although we’re warned to bring our own deckchair…!). Love it.
04
Sep 10
Week 507
The long weekend was a joy, and although this isn’t ‘work’, we did get round to scooping out about 9 frames of honey we’d taken from our bees earlier in the summer. The messy results of that sticky process are now sitting in a slowly filtering honey-bucket awaiting bottling in a few days.
After that, it was a new month, a new term and it feels like a new start. Having had hardly any EMI work to do this week I’ve been able to focus on the new startup. Now everyon is off holidays, we had a great catchup meeting on Thursday, with the whole team together. Awesome stuff, a few shifts in the various strands but overall momentum, which is invigorating.
Immediate tasks bubbled up with a pitch next week so Friday was spent putting some very quick screens for an iPhone app together and sketching out an iPad app. This weekend I’ll flesh those out and should have nice work ready for midweek.
In addition, I’ve been helping out with a little site for the New Forest Festival, learning a bit more than I’d like to know about WordPress. Really, I’m shocked by how popular WP is – it’s a right messy old nightmare doing things in it. Back to MoveableType for me next time!
Busy busy busy!
21
Aug 10
Week 506
Back on the weeknotes horse after summer off, apologies for the absence. It was a self imposed quiet from not wanting to crap on and moan about work not going in my preferred best direction. Also, I didn’t want to undermine myself by talking about future plans prematurely.
I’m currently splitting my time between winding down my participation with new digital product development with the record label and early design work for a new startup I’m involved with. The contrast between the two especially strong right now, where the project I had originally begun in November is culminating in multiple releases in early October. Meanwhile the startup has assembled a killer team, has multiple streams spinning up and should have a couple of early products out in October with more following.
This brush with corporate culture has been quite interesting but eventually the frustrating inertia inherent becomes frustrating and the opportunity to get out and at least fail fast again is irresistible.
23
May 10
Week 488
So like Phil I’ve had a lot of trouble getting back into Weeknotes after a holiday break. I tried doing the 30 Days Of Music which I will continue – just not right now.
I’m currently in a nice hotel room at the top on Nob hill in San Francisco. I arrived a week ago to continue work on a better digital music product, and this past week have been working with IDEO a bit. They wind down now and we shift to development with Pivotal Labs.
It’s a bit nerve wracking, I’m not sure we’re quite ‘there’ yet but we are a step or two forward from our prototype phase. The amount learned having built that is only now becoming clear to me and it’s been a big help deciding what is interesting and what is fun, rather than being dry and dusty about the whole thing. Users are not archivists, old records are not data.
Being Sunday I took some time away from work to enjoy sunshine, Blackpool winning their Premiership playoff and the Maker Faire here in SF. I can haz arduino, finally. The week ahead should be lots more work, not sure if it’ll be fun, but have a feeling it will be decisive.