Design Follows Data β About the Importance of Content
Building a web app is only half the story βοΈ. To deliver real value π, offering the right content π is essential.
First and foremost, the idea of UnscrewMe is based on quality content. While technology plays a central role, the best platform cannot replace content π‘.
Of course, the whole point of this effort is to make the event listings that are out there easier to find. This fragmentation is the main purpose why we work on UnscrewMe. At the same time, this fragmentation also makes it difficult to realise our vision. While some automation would be easily possible, the challenge is the wide variety of data we want to aggregate at a single place.
Identifying sources π
Before we can add the right content, we need to find the right content. Having been to plenty of wine tastings and events across London, we have a nice list of event hosts and locations we can monitor for new listings. But in addition to that, we constantly need to keep our eyes open to discover new content that is worth including on UnscrewMe.
While there could be an endless discussion about the benefits and issues of social media, it has proven very useful to us for event discovery. I am surprised that I regularly come across events in my Facebook newsfeed or on Twitter that I find genuinely interesting. The difficulty is that we cannot just scroll past them as most people probably do, but we should keep track of them all β and use the information to enrich our content offering.
Besides those somewhat accidental findings, we also follow a more structured approach. There are a range of generic events web sites and apps such as DesignMyNight and Eventbrite that already have a current list of curated, well-structured events. We think that for wine tastings, these sites often lack some useful search options, but we still want to make all the content that is presented on the different pages easily accessible on a single platform, on UnscrewMe.
Adding content efficiently π¨π»βπ»
The necessity to switch between content and technology does have an impact on the number of new events we can find and add. So far, we have not been adding as much content as we wanted to, but we do see a slow yet constant growth β and we already started using the web app under development ourselves to keep track of events, helping us drink more and miss less πΎ.
We established that just knowing of a wine tasting is not enough. Since we decided to start with a manual process and not automating everything right from the beginning, adding new events is time-consuming. Now, our mission is to reduce that time and streamline our process. And the more content we add and the more information we already have on our platform, the easier it gets to add new events.
For a head start, as soon as the back end was working, we filled it with wine tastings. As we added content, we also got a better idea of the data. Designing data structures and building systems is all nice and good, but often the real world does not exactly match the beautifully thought out patterns. For example, when thinking about the prospect of automating the process, we noticed that many times, plain copy and paste might not actually provide the data quality and presentation that we want to achieve. Without actual data, things like these are difficult to see.
Getting a better, more realistic impression of how the data we deal with looks like is essential. This allows us to learn from the data and adjust our idealistic data structures to the wild world outside. Observations that inform the implementation and also the design of the web app can be basic things like lengths of event titles, the nature of tasting descriptions or specific formatting used by different event sources.
Direct contact with real content helps to improve the data structures behind the scenes. But it doesnβt stop there, using our simple and pretty basic data input interface also gives us the experience we need to make adding new wine tastings more efficient. And the faster we can add new events, the more information we can provide, and the more useful UnscrewMe becomes β even at this early stage.
Setting targets π―
While we might have a kind of relaxed approach to motivation, we still set ourselves targets to keep ourselves on our toes. The good thing about targets is that if you do not let them dictate your life, but view them with a healthy distance, you can treat them a bit like high scores, this approach helps me to gamify routine work and motivate myself to keep adding new tastings.
To underscore the importance of this continuous effort, we have even included a metric in our Lean Canvas: βNumber of tastings per week or monthβ.
And the goals for our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in GitLab also cover non-functional aspects, such as:
- having at least one event listed for every single week
- listing events from at least three different sources every month
- listing in total at least ten events per month
- adding events for at least two months into the future
With the product taking shape, we also spend more time on looking for events and try to better understand our data sources to gradually push up the internal targets for event listings β boosting our high scores.
Assessing progress π
It is early days, but looking at our listings for the past few months, we are on a promising trajectory. Of course, we know that we need to invest more time more regularly to add new events. One difficulty is that many of the events are listed only a few weeks in advance. For example for May, we should be able to add a couple of more tastings at the end of April, which were not yet published online two or three weeks ago.
To give a brief overview, we have currently 15 events listed in March, 20 in April and so far 20 in May, every good thing starts small β with 98 tastings in total since we started adding content. By now, we cover events held at 25 different locations.
Prioritising content is important, yet we also have to keep pushing to add new functionality to our web app. Finding and maintaining the right balance between content and features will be one of our main challenges over the next few months before and after the launch.
Finally, as we always want to keep our eyes and ears open to find new, interesting wine events in London, we want to encourage you to get in touch with us if you know of anything you would like us to list on UnscrewMe β and letβs meet for a glass of wine! π·πΎ:
- Twitter: @unscrewmeapp
- Email: hello@unscrewme.co.uk
- Facebook: UnscrewMe
Starting something and working on it in a small team, most of the time alone actually, allows me to focus on the tasks that need to be done. However, as I will highlight in the next article, I see huge benefits in taking advantage of (free) co-working spaces and coffee shops like the Cafe at Google Campus London to surround myself with other ambitious doers for inspiration as well as to make interesting chance encounters and conversations possible.
(Besides lots of coffee at Kaffeine, Curators Coffee Gallery, and Sourced Market in Marylebone, I also had one wine recently over dinner with friends at the excellent Boqueria in Brixton that might be worth mentioning. I believe it was the white 2016 Vol dβΓnima de Raimat from the Costers del Segre region in the North-East of Spain, made of Chardonnay, Xarel.lo, AlbarinΜo grapes. An uncommon blend, at least new for me, and while I probably would mostly prefer a 100% AlbarinΜo, it was an interesting wine and I definitely prefer it over most pure Chardonnays.)
