At the beginning of the month I spent my first week with the Clearleft team in the English countryside for one of the annual Hack Farms. It's like Downton Abbey and Silicon Valley had a baby.
Day Zero
Dinner ends and the pitching begins. 20+ ideas are presented. After some deliberation, votes are cast and everyone begins choosing their teams. The team I’ve joined is I < 3 U Brah , the opposite of shipyourenemiesglitter.com.
On our team is Mikey, Sophie, Ben W, Kate and myself.
Day One
Like any good startup we start by claiming the space nearest to coffee, snacks and the leg of ham.
Begin by defining problems of our potential users. This opened up our dialog leading us to change the name of our service and open up the service to more users than just “Brahs”.
Now that we had a more clear view of who we were providing service to and what problem we were solving we set to work, writing our application definition.
For friends and family who want to show they care or offer practical help, Tiny Love provides a personal non-intrusive service to let someone know they are loved. Unlike cards or flowers it opens a simple channel of dialogue and support.
We take a break for lunch, some walking and a bit of a rest. The group proceeds to create a few user personas, a challenging and entertaining exercise.
We decide to call it a day, hopeful in the direction Tiny Love is heading.
Day Two
Gathering again in the coffee/tea/snack room we pick up where we left off by finalizing user personas. This would soon lead us into a sketching exercise to create our initial user flows. Spending two minutes each, we sketched out personal views of what a user flow would look like. We then merged these flows to the beginning of our UX/UI.
Just before lunch we write up a list of tasks for each of us to complete.
Resuming after a social lunch with the other teams we begin to work on our individual tasks in short sprints.
Mikey and Ben workout some quick UX and wireframes.
Sophie and Kate begin working on the physical product.
I begin work on the branding with a mood board.
By the end of the day we manage to have stayed in sync and communicating well. Sophie and Kate created a lovely physical prototype using only materials in the house.
I developed the logo and identity to be used for branding.
Ben and Mikey design a pleasant UI with a simple and delightful UX.
Day Three
Everyone takes a rest day enjoying the good weather. Cycling, walking, running, eating, and some drinking are part of the RnR.
Day Four
Our team is now down to three members - Kate, Mikey and myself. Mikey continues coding the website, Kate composes the script and produces the photos to be used in our presentation. I work on designing the slides for our presentation and photoshopping some of the additional assets.
Day Five
We say goodbye to Ben W. and Mikey finalizes the website with some magic php (thanks Graham!) and a media query – it’s functional and ready to go live and send some Tiny Love. Kate crafts the script a bit more. I finalize the design for our presentation.
Our presentation is a bit more like a pitch, rather than a recap of what we did throughout the week. This did not keep us from being proud of our concept and prototype.
For friends and family who want to show they care or offer practical help, Tiny Love provides a personal non-intrusive service to let someone know they are loved. Unlike cards or flowers it opens a simple channel of dialogue and support.