#picle

my gf is like, obsessed w/ this pickle

Yesterday will be the last day we went to watch Portugal play for the Euro 2012 in a Stockwell restaurant :( There was a big group of us, energy and tension was high, and we were terribly excited and nervous about the game. Unfortunately we lost, but we leave the Euro with our heads held high and proud of our brilliant performance.  

Some thoughts and learnings at Made by Many and on working with Picle App 

I believe I have been quite fortunate so far here at Made by Many. I have been exposed to various interesting situations and conversations. They have propelled me into taking some time to reflect where I was before I started, to where I am now. Where it started About a year and a half ago, I began reading "The Art of Innovation", by Tom Kelley,  general manager of IDEO. It’s a brilliant book. As a student at Hyper Island, offering a strategic focus on digital advertising, my mind slowly drifted towards fascination by IDEO's 'human' and user-led projects. My contributions to the OpenIDEO platform began as way to start learning and expose my passion for designing better solutions to social problems. This book, as well as attending a lecture by Bruce Mau in Stockholm, was my embarkation into a journey knowing that this was the kind of field I wanted to work in. At Hyper Island we were learning various tools to help us be more creative, for example during ideation and team building, and I felt there were minor resemblances to IDEO when reading the book. I began craving for the human insights and experiences of projects, they are the values I cherish. I wanted to re-design the shopping cart too!

The importance of prototyping Chapter 6 of The Art of Innovation is called: "Prototyping is the Shorthand of Innovation". It basically says there is no substitute for building things enough to try them out. The aim is to make mistakes & discoveries before you have the answers. One of the examples used is that of Amazon, started by Jeff Bezos: after quitting his Wall Street job to pursue his imagined company, his aim was to get it up and get it out. Function preceded style and editorial content. The first Amazon.com was low on graphics and animation. It loaded fast and excelled at the basics - easy to find and buy books. Very much what Made by Many practices and preaches, as they mention in this blog post, about the first version of Picle app: "We deliberately built less, because the leaner you are the easier it is to change."  Prototyping at Made by Many Well, it seems my day dreaming about IDEO-and-Bruce-Mau-ways-of-doing-things kind of turned into reality! I’ve felt that at Made by Many we work surprisingly similarly to what I've read about IDEO, however with a dedicated approach to Agile & Lean Startup principles: "work quickly, waste little, respond to change and release working software as often as possible". One major difference I notice here at MxM is that very often they share their iterative processes (successes & failures) of working with products and services very openly. I don't see many companies doing this, especially not IDEO. I'm quite certain this is a big factor that will continue accelerating my learning process here as an intern. 

Nonetheless, at this stage I find myself putting into perspective many things I read in The Art of Innovation, very happily, in the Service Design team at Made by Many. I am working on interesting projects and hoping my analysis has a small influence on them. That's why I feel lucky: to have found a company that allows me to put to practice a lot of service and product design issues for the first time, and begin connecting the dots since I became passionate about innovation and reading all about it, until now: prototyping in real-life with real innovation projects.  

Working on Picle For the last few weeks I’ve been working on designing user journeys for the future updates of Picle app. We’ve been working through small iterations and releasing a few updates every two weeks, based on feedback gathered from users. Although I have not accompanied the evolution of Picle from pre-launch to launch as a Minimum Viable Product, until today, it is still at a stage needing prioritising and testing. I am particularly interested in asking/observing how current users use Picle, or why they are not using it. How could we make the experience of the 50,000 + users of Picle better? That is really exciting I think, as there is so much room for imagination when using Picle, and that seems to be part of this journey: learning through the lens of the user! One of my most important learnings when working on future user flows, has been that I sometimes over complicate things instead of breaking the problem down into parts, and working to simplify as much as possible. The people I’ve been working with at Made by Many have really helped me grasp this concept to work more fluidly. I hope to soon do a post more focused on all my learnings and tools gathered, as these kind of posts help me to analyse and think about what I am actually doing and learning.  - Below follow a few photos of the Picle app wall where we’ve been having discussions round user journeys with some of my sketches.