Design isn’t done, but it’s done enough for now.
Not sure what this is, start here with our README, or catch up on last week, VRBTM Stepping Back | WK VII.
Returned to the Ace Hotel this weekend. May get together with Nick tomorrow, but after disrupting the cadence with a slow weekend last week I needed to get back into it. It wasn’t a necessarily conscious decision to work here, but for whatever reason it made sense coming back to where we began.
One thing Nick and I talked about last weekend was diminishing returns as we move forward. Clearly with just the two of us we are each taking on a lot of different responsibilities. Meaning that some of those are not what we’re best at. So we problem solve, make it happen, and learn as we go along. However, there will come a time when it no longer makes sense for us to be doing some of the things we are now. So much so, that if we keep doing them for too long it will actually hold us back.
One of these things for me is taking on the role of designer. We of course need some sense of design language and consistency throughout the product and marketing materials. Which for the past few weeks I’ve been handling, and with nearly all of the screens worked up it’s in a place that I’m happy with…for now. For now, because it’s more important that we get a functioning product actually in the hands of people will use it, with a design that is good enough. Good enough that it’s not taking away from the experience, but understanding that it may not be adding much either. At this stage, that second part is something that comes later. We have to move on. One of the worst possible outcomes would be that we spend an unnecessary amount of time designing, adding features, etc. that when we get to a full launch we’ve spent all that time creating someting that no one actually wants.
Therefore, at this time with a design language that is consistent translates throughout the product, and has enough adaptability to work with any new features we may add it’s time I shift my focus away from this and onto something else again. The next time we really look at design, we’ve decided that we’ll bring in a freelance designer to do the work. Not to do a complete overhaul, but to finesse what we have and make it work harder for us. That’s the benefit of getting so much out of the way up front. The investment will be less later on.
You can see how all of this has come together and click around in our InVision Prototype, as well as see the design language here:
Now that we have a defined feature list that Nick’s implementing and a complete design language it’s time that I revert to a bit of marketing work. When I reviewed our timeline a couple weeks ago, I realized that by January 2017 we should have a near complete product as far as functionality is concerned. There will still be a number of things remaining that will need to happen to make it a professional product, but there will be a lot we can do with what we’ll have at that time. Namely getting people on-boarded to the product — a true Beta Phase.
I have a handful of people and companies in mind that I can get using the product for us, and I’m sure Nick has the same. To on-board them successfully, we’ll need to educate them. Of course, the product is meant to be intuitive, but that doesn’t mean everyone will know how to fully utilize every feature as we intended them to. We’re trying to change the way people work, and likely they’ll need some help with that.
An unfair advantage for those people during this beta phase is that they’ll have pretty much direct access to both Nick and I. So when they have questions on how something should work or feedback of things we should change, they can come straight to us. However, when more people come to use the product that wont be sustainable any longer. Diminishing returns again.
Every product does it one way or another, but a standard practice seems to be an email campaign sent out over time to a new user after they sign up detailing the features and benefits of using them. This type of campaign is known as a ‘Drip Campaign’, as the emails come out over time with just a bit of information in each one. Often this information is also available on the products website as well. (Maybe we make a Medium article at first to keep things lean 🙃).
Anyway, our Drip Campaign will need to answer the following:
- How do I get started and set my preferences?
- What are the main features and how they work?
- How do I onboard team members?
- What’s the best way I should onboard my clients (to this new system we’re using and why will it benefit them too)?
There a plenty of things that will go into each of the points above which I’m giving myself the next four weeks to figure out. One a week, thought these will always be a work in progress as we learn what questions our users need answered most.
Read the other half of this week with Nick’s vrbtm.co development stream | Week VIII where he implements some new user focused functionality.
We’d love to hear from you…
Get in touch at Founders@vrbtm.co, talk with us on twitter @vrbtm.co, and read our story on medium.
Wes Jones is on Twitter @WesJonesCo
Nick Dandakis is on Twitter @Dandakis
