Hours 11, 12, 13 and 14!!!!: We love it when a plan comes together…
Posted on | November 27, 2009 | No Comments
First of all, MASSIVE SORRY for the hourly updates dropping off. Hopefully this post will make up for it. I’ll try to make it as awesome as possible.
Biggest news after 4 hours of the most manic work any of us has ever done is… wait for it… the Dr Hue holding page is now up! You can go there now and sign up for updates.
Actually, that’s not much news at all is it? (Sorry – I’m knackered!) The REAL news is what each of our teams have been up to. (Oh, and that the eBay auction is now up to $250). Here’s a summary from the teams!
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Design
Excellent progress here. Obviously with a proposition like “shop by colour” the biggest task is going to be navigation of the site. The plan is to make it really easy for people to choose a colour (either by clicking, or uploading a ’swatch’ image to sample), and then make it easy for people to refine that search, bringing them closer to the colour of product they want… then people can worry about what type of product they want!
He's getting more helpful by the minute... (Clicky for bigger)
There’s also a lot of work going on with pens and paper as to the way that search results are displayed and refined, and the secondary navigation (i.e. by properties other than colour!) Should have more pretty pictures of that stuff soon!
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Tech
The techy dudes have progressed at an amazing rate on 4 fronts:
- Data import. John’s been working like a madman at this. He’s now pulling very close to to 13,000 products to our database…
- …which Ed’s built and nearly finished creating Search for, and has all the relevant fields for our colour information…
- …which is a TOUGH nut to crack! Rich is doing that and it’s looking really cool. He’s doing some amazing magic with OpenCV, paving the way to match our search results with…
- …colours derived from people’s uploaded photos, which Dan is sorting out with some JavaScript / AJAX and PHP awesomeness!!!
This is an amazing achievement, but, unfortunately at this stage the guys have no idea if they can pull these 4 streams together, and then skin them with the design templates in time for our midday deadline… which is in 9 hours! (Whiskey bottle status update; down to 2/3 full!)
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Marketing
Yep, this stream has now started in earnest. It kicked off with a remarkably intense brainstorm, considering it started at neary 1:00AM, and carried on until 2:15!
"Seriously guys, let's do it MY way!"
"OK, cool, let's do it your way."
To cut a long story short, two hours later we had our campaign thought… Dr Hue’s Colourful Personailities. What does this mean? Well, it dropped out of thinking about who would most naturally want to “shop by colour” – i.e. people who are really confident with colours and use them to express themselves… and also thinking about other people who wish they were!
Colourful Personalities
So, this is a social media campaign, designed to celebrate people who are colourful, publicly. These guys are our influencers, and by going after them first, and showing them how easy Dr Hue makes it for you to shop by colour, the idea is that – as aspirational people in the fashion and home furnishings markets (our two key markets), people will copy their behaviour and start to use Dr Hue too. Of course this is where all the super-simple UX design will really come into its own.
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