It’s officially underway! We just had our first“kick off meeting.” An almost 3 hour long remote brainstorming conference call, via Zoom, with Dan, Chris, Dave, Afyia, and myself. We covered so much - from expectations for this project, to what Chris and Dave wanted, to ideas that Dan had, and to what Afyia and I hoped to get out of this and how we could contribute.
We put together a shared Notion(seriously, check it out www.notion.so) file where we put together a Kanban board and where would be able to submit our notes, ideas, Sketch/Figma files, etc.(Notion is awesome by the way, it’s basically become my go-to planning and organization app. If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend doing so. The functionality is amazing and I’m still learning what all it can – hey, embedded Codepen!).
The first task was for Dan to compile all of our extensive notes and plans and put it together on the Kanban board, get a Slack channel going, and put together a plan for a weekly“stand up” meeting. In the meantime, we would start designing some ideas.
First on the agenda was for Afyia and I to start taking an idea that we were really interested in and just start iterating on some ideas. I wanted to play around with“episode card” ideas so I jumped on that….
We also put together a plan to develop a user survey and have Dan, Chris, and Dave send it out over Twitter, Slack, etc. Afyia and I would do the same to our network. Once we had survey results, we could develop a persona(or 2) in order to ensure that we were developing the site for the key demographics. We would also follow up the survey with additional user interviews to really ensure that we are including the most important features that users want from this site.
….the project is underway!
I personally prefer using Sketch so here are some of my initial episode card iterations. One thing that has actually taken me a bit to realize, and that Dan has stressed, is that in this early phase, no idea is a dumb idea. Just play around, push some pixels around, and iterate. This isn’t the final design, the ideas here may be terrible, but we’re just brainstorming. Also,“Steal Like An Artist” or in Dan’s words“Steal Your Way to Original Designs.”
January - February 2019