Bare Naked App

I’m a strong believer that a poorly designed architecture will affect the application - it’s not a case of if, but when, and not in a positive way! Personally I find it so surprising that this phase of a project is ever overlooked, in a hair-pulling, teeth-grinding, shouting “NO” at the top of my voice kind of way! It’s frustrating.

When I’m involved in a project from this stage I always try to take a step back, do some analysis, think of objects, patterns and other UMLesk features. In these few days three books are always an arms length away, I highly recommend them all to anyone involved in development/software architecture.

• Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design Shalloway/Trott
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software Gamma/Helm/Johnson/Vlissides
• UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the stanard Object Modeling Language Fowler

I usually start on paper, and once I’ve done 50% or so I’ll move digital. I use Dia on Linux for my UML modeling, however there’s plenty of choice, and they’re all cross platform (apparently).

• Gaphor
• ArgoUML
• Eclipse IDE Plugins

The UML will evolve over time, this should slow down as the product matures (assuming requirements don’t change) however, keeping the UML up-to-date is important.. at some point in the future it will be referenced by someone (myself or another) and if it’s not up-to-date I’d expect that hair-pulling, teeth-grinding, shouting “NO” at the top of my voice frustration all over again.

I had been talking to Ryan and Gill about (the now named) Amigo for a little bit. I had a good grasp of what it does and their passion about it, but I wanted to get some really simple and impulsive reactions to a few basic questions. It’s this kind of information that helps me try to get in the mindset of what the design needs to convey. So I sent along this email:

I typically like to start with some sketches before jumping onto the computer. If it’s alright with you guys, I would like to include you in the process. I have tried this a couple of times before with clients and gotten mixed results, but you guys are cool and I definitely think you will get it. Don’t worry, I help you through it :D

What would be good for me right now to get sketching are for you to throw out some info for me. These can be very loose (I don’t even need full sentences). I am just looking for the feeling and emotional responses you want to convey. Stuff like:

1. Words you would associate with your new company/service
2. What you would like others to think of you/the outward face you would like to portray
3. What it will be like using your service
4. Can you give me a brief walkthrough for someone using the site? Why do they come to you and what do they get out of it?

This will help me start to work up some rough ideas. And I really mean that when I say rough, so don’t expect the polish yet. We are just trying to get the right idea, the right look will come soon.

And I got some great feedback:

1. Words you would associate with your new company/service?

• Opportunity
• DIY (Do It Yourself)
• Making money
• Marketing products
• Community
• Meeting others
• Mutual gain
• Balance
• Helping each other
• Everyone’s a winner
• Trust
• Self-policing

2. What you would like others to think of you/the outward face you would like to portray?

Want them to think:

• Easy to use and friendly interface
• A great opportunity made real by Amigo
• Grateful that we did it
• There’s no barrier to entry

Like to portray:

• Simple
• Professional yet friendly
• Approachable
• It’s easy, not complex
• A service for everyone
• Clear benefits

3. What it will be like using your service?

• Super easy and intuitive
• Enjoyable
• Creative
• Easy to make money
• Minimal input on both sides
• Quick
• Painless

5. Can you give me a brief walkthrough for someone using the site? Why do they come to you and what do they get out of it?

• They come to the site because they want to market a product, or want to make money.
• What they get out of it is cash and exposure for their product.

Both will feel:

• Happy that they are making use of something that was previously untapped and kind of smug that they are able to make use of that untapped area.
• They may feel that it’s like a secret club and only they know about it or like they are pioneers – doing something no-one else is.
• They may feel clever like they are in the know and testing something new.
• Economical (ie they are making use of every last option)
• Educated – they will tell others about it and probably show them how it works too.
• Like it’s a great opportunity that was never there before.
• Like they are taking the future of their business into their own hands.

We’re off to a great start!

Clickety click*
Click fest
Click jam
Click stick
Trapdoor
Trader Bob *
Bid Pod
ListoPod *
Clickswitch
Billpod
Clickable *
UHug
The one with stars are those we liked best.

Jason was supposed to start the design work tomorrow and Gill and I still hadn’t picked a name for the web app. Argh!

The good news is that we had a meeting in London, so we had a good four hours in the car to brainstorm. Driving is perfect for brainstorming. In fact, I think most of Carson Systems’ good ideas have come from Gill and I driving somewhere and throwing around ideas.

We tried to think about what the software was going to do, and we came up with a bunch of short words. For some reason, I had the idea of trying to use a French word, instead of an English word. The web app is based on creating relationships, so we thought “Kiss” would be good, for which the French word is “bisou”. I thought the phonetic spelling of “Beezoo” would be good.

We knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t want a name that didn’t mean anything. A lot of people think that once you get a product to market and everyone knows what it is then the name doesn’t matter (like Google). We agree (if you’re Google) but we also think that using a name that is basically gobbledegook makes it harder in the beginning for people to identify with your product. And to some extent makes it harder for us as the creators to pin down a personality (hey we’re all about making life easy!). So we decided we didn’t want a ‘nonsense’ name.

The other thing we didn’t want was to find two words that meant something and put them together to make the app name example Drop and Send = DropSend, or Blink-Sale, Num-Sum. We like the name DropSend (and we like and use the other apps) but we didn’t want our name to be pigeonholed as a ‘type 1′ web app name. Come on, you have to roll with the times!

So from playing around with various words that conjoured up “relationships” we came up with “Amigo”, and we both liked it (a rare occurrence during this particular meeting).

After thinking hard about all the angles, and if there were any major flaws with the name, we decided to keep it.

Full steam ahead with the branding, maybe Jason will use these South American banana stickers as a starting point. Or maybe not!

Dave has pounded out the XHTML and minimal CSS for our wireframe. He did it in an impressive two days! It’s great to see it as actual HTML as it makes it more real. It also helped us see a couple of usability problems and inconsistencies.

All of this backs up the fact that it’s important to create something real as soon as possible, instead of staring at wireframes for too long.

I’ve made a list of about 30 changes that need to be made (all fairly minor stuff), so once Dave knocks those out, he can actually begin coding it!

Gill and I travelled down to Brighton to meet up with Dave, our developer. We met in a brilliant cafe called “The Fringe” and chowed down some burgers and beers.

I’d highly recommend meeting up with your freelancers before they commence work. It was tremendously valuable for several reason:

1. We found some holes in the app and how it worked
2. It was a good chance to chat and get to know each other
3. We thought of an amazing idea that Gill and I wouldn’t have come up with on our own

We had Dave sign the contract and we paid him his first installment of £1966.66. We always pay on a 3-stage timeframe.

• 1/3 on signing of the contract
• 1/3 on the completion of a working beta
• 1/3 on launch

As we decided to hire freelancers, instead of fulltime employees, it was time to find a developer and get him or her on board.

Here’s how we decided who to hire …

Plum Digital Media was the amazing team that we hired to build DropSend, our first web app. They had too many projects to be able to work on this second app, so we started looking elsewhere.

I sat down to have a think about who we could hire and I drew a total blank. This was a bit disconcerting, as I should know a ton of developers because we run Carson Workshops. The only thing I could think of was to send out an email to the Carson Workshops newsletter, as there are a ton of freelance developers that subscribe and are always looking for work.

Here’s what I said:

Hey everyone!

We’re getting ready to build our second web application, and we’re looking for a developer to build it.

If you’re a freelance LAMP developer, with some basic AJAX skills, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll need you for around 3 - 4 weeks, full time. You can telecommute - no problem.

We’ll need you to start around April 10th.

If you’re interested, please send the following:

1. URL to your site
2. Approximate cost for 4 weeks full time work
3. City and Country
4. Phone number
5. List of previous projects (with URLs) and your exact role in them

Looking forward to hearing from you!

It was great, as I received 10 replies in the first five minutes! Interestingly enough, one of them was from David Stone, a developer who’d attended one of our workshops. He had made the effort of chatting to me at our summit, “The Future of Web Apps”, so I remembered who he was immediately.

We received quotes anywhere from $5,000 - $25,000, so it was quite a range. David came in at $8,688 and he was available when we needed him. One of the biggest factors in us choosing him is that we knew him and felt we could trust him (it also helped that he was somewhat local).

If you’re a freelancer, I guess my advice to you would be: Make the effort to get to know your potential clients personally - it’s usually the deciding factor.

P.S. Photo by Peter J. Lambert

We just found out that perfecting the wireframe is not only extremely time-consuming but also that it’s difficult to video outside the office. We thought it would be a great idea to run over the wireframe on a lazy Saturday afternoon in our local coffee shop. We would video the whole thing and it would make fun and interesting viewing - we were wrong!

Click the header to watch the video clip.

(more…)