Flapjack and Potts
Biggest news this week? My son getting a place at Sussex University to study Psychology. Very proud of him. He’ll be leaving home in just over a month’s time, on his 19th birthday.
Workwise, there’s been some solid progress with Race.Radio. I met with Michael Dales (a.k.a. Digital Flapjack) at TechHub on Thursday. We had a really good session going through the prototype and refining the functional requirements document. He’s also a ‘maker’ and may be able to 3D print a basic mount we can use for the buttons. We seem to be aligned on approach: breaking what could be quite a complex product down into manageable chunks of work — and getting to the next working, testable prototype as quickly as possible. Lean startup in action!
I like the vibe at TechHub. It’s not full of people posturing in the manner you see at some co-working spaces. Everyone there is a founder, co-founder or early-stage employee. You see companies at every stage of the journey— from two co-founders huddled at a table, to groups of three or four in a little office, right up to teams of 20+ people in branded offices with their own meeting rooms. Can’t begin to tell you how much I’d love to have a team of 5–6 people on a mission to produce a great product in a year’s time.
Aside from that, I had a good call with Rob Potts, my supervisor for the Industry Research Project with Hyper Island. I was concerned my research proposal was straying towards being too functional and self-serving (basically I’m trying to demonstrate product-market fit for Race.Radio). He gave me exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for. Looking back at my notes, here’s what I took away:
- I have to try and elicit something nobody else has discovered
- I have to avoid just describing my research
- I have to be prepared to rattle my assumptions
He’s since sent a bunch of academic reading as stimulus and there’s some really interesting stuff in there about cognitive ethnography, sonification, paradigms of Human Computer Interaction and “ambient computing”. I love the idea of the button being so simple to use it effectively disappears from view. One thing we agreed upon was the fascinating opportunity for contextual research that the product enables i.e. recording conversations and thoughts as people are actually cycling.
Regardless, I felt the need to push on with some market research, even if it isn’t ultimately used in the masters. So I put together a cycling survey using Typeform (love) and shared it on Twitter and Facebook with the help of Andrew my bro, and the bazillion cycling groups he’s joined. There have been over 200 responses in less than 24 hours, which gives me some hope of getting to 400 which would be a statistically significant sample size.
I’m not quite sure what the results are telling me yet. As with any data, it could be interpreted in a number of ways. The most important thing is that the majority of cyclists see the value in communicating with others while out on rides, and have experienced problems in doing so. How much of a problem that is, and how people have gone about trying to address it (if at all) I’ll try to get to with some 1:1 interviews. Unfortunately, because of incessant rain, I wasn’t able to get out to the cycling cafés nearby this week.
Next week, I’m off to Lancaster to cycle the Day Two route for the Tour of the Roses. When I get back the plan is to get some of those interviews done before I check in again with Rob on the research. Really excited to see what progress Michael can make (nice to have someone else in my Slack channel).
Onwards.
