The entire of the 24hour-startup team, plus a good 50 or so auction followers were glued to the eBay auction, and over-using the “Refresh” button as the auction counted down. Personally, I was on a 3-way iPhone con call with Dave and Nick (that’s just how I roll!!)

The excitement was incredible, because in the last hour – as the bid history shows – the price more than tripled from $1500 to a final amount of $5,100!

Perhaps this had something to do with the boys at The Telegraph writing up the story. Not only did we make their website, but also got onto page 2 of the Business section of The Sunday Telegraph.

(Note to our Mums… you can download a PDF of that article here!) Apart from me looking like a psycho killer, and Robbie giving his cheesiest smile, we think the photo isn’t bad. At least it makes Dr Hue look like the main man, which of course, for those of you who want to Shop By Colur (TM!), he is!

There’s a couple of inaccuracies in The Telegraph’s report – to be expected when conducting a rushed telephone interview, I guess. The two we’d most like to address are:

• As well as Nonsense and White October, the guys at Hutchhouse deserve a mention for their beautiful web design work. (Which, by the way, was all managed through their awesome new bit of software AllWorkedUp – kind of like version control / project management software but specifically for designers – check it out.)
• We’re quoted at saying we wanted £20,000 for DrHue.com! This was taken a bit out of context. That was our estimate of the hours – at rate card price – that had been put into the project. Not that we’d have complained (after all, I’ve got to fund my very important purchases somehow). This was about having an awesome experience together, and an experimenet in how fast a startup can be made (they’re a bit slow sometimes, we thought!).

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We have had contact with the buyers. Apparently they’re a few city types from the same football team who have clubbed together to take on Dr Hue as a little side project. Looking forward to meeting them on Weds evening!

(I think we’ll probably document all that stuff on Dr Hue’s blog.)

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Also, Will made a nice little animated banner / TV ad for DrHue!!!

Nice, eh?

Don’t make films on 24 hour benders. from NonsenseLondon on Vimeo.

Development:

Histograms, nested sets and saturation: It’s not easy conversation over in developer land. Suffice to say – it’s all good, it’s all progress and all starting to fall into place. It’s always a nice feeling when the site finally get’s it’s skin.

Design:

The site design team are mopping up the last pieces of the jigsaw, filling in the gaps and relying on more and more matchsticks to keep the creatives coming.

Marketing:

Blogger outreach: The DrHue Blog is up and blog.drhue.com. As you can see the first post is a little treat for those who simply adore colour – the chance to win a free mystery gift in your favourite colour simply by blogging / tweeting about Dr Hue (his is for real – you can actually win!).

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.

Meal 2 of 4 – next eat, midnight feast… Bring it on! from NonsenseLondon on Vimeo.

Any prospective buyers, look away now.

Anyway, hours 8 and 9 have flown by in a blur. But there’s been some awesome progress.

In order to make Dr Hue perfect for people who want to “shop by colour”, we needed to do a focus group. So, a bit of twitter-action rustled up long-time friend on Nonsense, Anna Hutton. Anna is pretty much the perfect one-woman focus group for this for 2 reasons:

1. She manages a shop that sells the kind of things we envisage people will buy through Dr Hue – Oliver Bonas.
2. She’s an artist, and one who places particular emphasis on experimenting with colour and space.

Perfect!

Thanks Anna! xxx

Dave and Rob interviewed Anna in front of sketches of key pages on the Dr Hue site. Two important things dropped out:

• More emphasis needed to be placed on people being able to find complimentary colours. Previously our search tools focussed on matching colours – which is important, but now we’re thinking about how to deal with that too, and make suggestions earlier.
• Our search results won’t all have photos (the feeds we get from the stores often only have 1 photo for a product with, say, 4 colours available). So, our original plan was to return these results too, along with the “wrong” photo… the chat with Anna made us realise people will just think the site doesn’t work. So, now we’re looking at a way to separate those out.

ONWARDS!!! (Yes, I am getting a bit delirious.)

Burp!

We also ate a load of very tasty pizza from Soho Pizza – which is awesome, by the way.