Hello January…
Our January started with a scribble on the whiteboard. “354 days until Christmas”. Not that we’re wishing the year away, we have a lot to do in those 354 days. With a launch date in mind, we are full steam ahead. This week has mainly been spent working out what our weeks hold as we get near to our launch date, debating the features that should make 1.0, and talking about how much we all ate over the holidays. We ate a lot.
The Offset team has morphed slightly since we last posted. Sadly we said goodbye to Tom Taylor before Christmas, and waved him off to Manchester to seek new challenges. So our team now stands at 5. Utku, our fearless leader and product man. Ben, Axel and Elise, the three musketeers of code. And myself, Jesse, designer.
We returned to the office to find an inbox full of feedback from our beta testers, which is great for several reasons.
- People like the app so much they actually want it to be more useful. This makes us happy because it means people are finding a use for the tool we’re making, but now want to do even more with it.
- Fresh eyes. We love it when we hear feedback about something that we hadn’t thought of, or something that isn’t intuitive enough and needs tweaking.
It’s great figuring out out which features people think are ‘cool’ and which are simply vital in making a useful tool that people love. Learning how people use the app, and what they think is missing is so useful. It’s also very nice to hear things like this:
“I really like the possibilities”
“So far I love the idea and the simplicity.”
“I know I’m going to be using this often.”
We’ve also been busy working on our teaser web page, launching very soon…we hope. Along side this, the brand for our product has been developed further. We have a name, a colour, and we have a logo! Still work in progress, but these things take time.
This week also saw us needing to demonstrate some motion within the app. I opened After Effects, then closed it when I remembered it scares me a little. Too many buttons, and not enough practice. After a quick Google, we downloaded Principle. Amazingly it only took two brains, and an hour to work out how to create something pretty solid. We definitely recommend this tool, its pretty simple to learn and you can get some great results from it.
So, first week in 2016 done. On to the next one…
👋
