Is a matter of TIME
The goal was clear: design a web application in 9 weeks and then share it with the world!
It didn’t sound too difficult for me, after all I write code every day and I am asked to perform miracles in a weekly basis, but this time was different and a lot more complicated than I anticipated. At work my typical software development begins with a clearly stated need, users are literally shouting what they need to do, I just have to pick the bits and pieces screamed during meetings and put it all together. No one cares about what the final product looks like, is function over looks. But for this time no one was asking for anything, I had to start from nothing, or close to; I wanted to develop something around how users perceive time. After some initial user interviews I tried to see in their answers a call for a new form of seeing our time, a way that doesn’t allow us to forget about a date because time did fly on the gym. And now what?!
Well the seed of the idea was there and for next week I had to come up with something that could be materialized into a product (that ideally someome would want …). Rushing into a brainstorm session I vomited some stupid ideas in an A4 piece of paper while listening to Max Richter. Oh God! Some of those ideas where bad, and I mean really bad. The main weakness of the majority of them was that Google Calendar was already doing it … They use to say ‘go big or go home’ or its alternate version ‘you will not get anywhere new if you walk the same paths as other people’, so among all of the ideas I pick the most ridiculous: Time is good for two people to meet but what if we can create our own personal measure of time?! I know …
Into the next week of the project and I have to story board the problem and solution. Fortunately the idea seems less crazy (or maybe I am getting crazier). But haven’t we all been in this situation at some point? We have a load of stuff to do, and on paper we have enough time for everything, but the reality is that we can never acomplished what we planned and we get frustrated.
There is a relationship between our mood and our time perception, music alone is enough to make us perceive the time differently, imagine then all that is going around us every day. What if we could collect to understand an predict our time perception?
Another week has gone through and I need to start testing something. Forget about the complex algorithms that will bring value through this app and focus on the visuals: design is everything for this project. After a couple of days drafting my revolutionary app I see the result and it is a damn calendar app. Nothing different other than a small button at the bottom to turn on relative mode. Will that be enough? (Spoiler alert: it was not) Time is ticking and I have to set a skype call with some colleagues. In the middle of this I feel robbed by Coursera as they fail to provide the right tools to complete this project phase. A couple of heuristic tests after I have my conclusions: the back and forward buttons are working ok … Let’s take a deep breath and prepare a wireframe of the home screen:
Next week’s goal is just to prepare a high fidelity prototype of a couple of pages and the website (I have been calling it app but is actually a web …) navigation skeleton. It takes a while for me that they are expecting us to use inVision (or similar) to prepare the prototype. After deleting the apache docker image in my server I get to investigate this inVision thingy. Cool stuff but … this is going to be hell to prepare all the images representing the application status!!!! Month, week and day view all in both relative (user’s subjective time) and normal mode, with and without a meeting created. At this point I wish I had more time to interview users and select which features to prototype.
Following week and a few hours later the “full” prototype is ready. As long as the users don’t press many buttons it will look fine; that scares me because when I install a new application I do touch all the buttons until I know what everything does, let’s hope I am the only weirdo. My peers review my work and give my high marks, unfortunately some forget that I can see who actually visits the prototype page, only one of the three evaluators did actually log in and use the prototype, the others lied and give me the marks! LAST TIME I PAY FOR ANYTHING IN COURSERA.
Is now time to convince three people to test the prototype in person. I make them read and sign the form that gives me permission to record them after getting them a free drink at the cafe we are at. They don’t know each other or will meet but they will always be the first ever tester of a new website. Despite my smile and my encouragement I get really little feedback on the application, although one item remains: What is again this relative time thing? Total Failure!!!!!
There is no time to pivot, the course ask us to pick an change an item from our design an test both versions in A/B testing. We are then asked to create an account in usertesting.com and I start to wonder if there is some advertising involved in this course. The feedback is good and more fluid & useful than the in-person test (which probably means that even when I smile I am still scary, …).
What conclusion did I reach? Design takes time: interviewing, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, etc. But it does not have to be like this, because users are scared of something too new or different. Whatever is your idea (a customizable calendar based on subject time perception collecting user mood progression) decimate it by 100 and you will be closer to what the user wants (a customizable calendar where you can change the background image — this is actual feedback from a couple of testers). Not only your work will be much less, but you will be able to focus on each little step and you will have a development plan for probably 20 years until you reach your initial complex vision.
As mighty Homer J. Simpson said: “I don’t know, Herb. People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it or something.”
