Homegrown UX and entering the world of industrial design

The buttons only arrived with Michael on Tuesday. We spoke on Wednesday about the current status and made, or rather confirmed, a couple of decisions in terms of platforms and direction. By the 24 September, all the de-risking should be complete and we’ll begin development of the ‘ugly’ application.

That prompted me to look over the current homegrown Google Slides prototype and I spent the best part of a day adding further screens and details to reduce the ambiguity. It’s still far from perfect, but hopefully Michael will be able to use his common sense to plug any gaps in the UX and we can get something serviceable built for testing purposes. Going much further would be pushing the limits of Google Slides. As it stands it was probably a wise decision not to try and teach myself how to use a proper wireframing/prototyping tool. I’ll leave that to the experts when the time comes.

I spent some time investigating the government’s Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS), a tax incentive encouraging investors to throw their spare cash at entrepreneurs like myself. I’m likely going to use an online service my friend Roger (founder of Felix) told me about — SeedLegals — to set it all up, but I first had to get a UTR for Race.Radio, which I’d incorporated but not yet registered for tax.

On a whim, I decided to search on Upwork for industrial designers who might produce some concepts and renders of the product, as well as packaging, for an investor deck and potential crowdfunding campaign. It didn’t take long to find some pretty talented people with highly relevant work in their portfolios (seems like everyone’s designed a fitness wearable at some point). Not just that, many of them had experience producing physical prototypes and even contacts offshore for low-cost manufacturing.

Naturally, their costs were much lower than what I was quoted in the early days by London-based design studios. So much lower, that I figured I may as well try and find someone with whom I could establish a longer-term relationship. With the circuit board, firmware and button casing being thoroughly tested, the design and production of the casing is a relatively straightforward job. I’ve interviewed three people from Romania, South Africa and the East Coast of the US, and I’m waiting on costs from a couple of them. My gut is pointing me towards one of them, but I’m going to try and balance that intuition with a more rational scorecard. Decision to be made next week.

Overall, it feels like I can get further, faster, than I maybe though t— without too much investment. Next week I’d like to get more of the legal stuff sorted, re-writing Articles of Association etc. I also need to re-engage with the Master’s paper and get out and about doing some more interviews.

Onwards.