Another Picle Update
Apologies for the radio silence on how Picle has been developing since the last release. The reason for this is that we have been wrestling internally over what Picle actually is. It sounds rather existential, but by watching how people use Picle and feedback to us, we have had to ask some deeper questions than 'How can we get more people using the app?'.
Here is a panaromic shot of some sketches, printouts and timeline up in the Picle den.
Firstly to help inform our decisions we focused on the things we have received the most feedback about.
Player - Consumption of content
Communities - Finding other users and sharing your content.
We then explored 3 different scenarios for what Picle could evolve into.
1. Optimise mobile so there is an Instagram like stream.
This would be mobile focused only and we would leave the web service.
2. Focus on Picleapp.com
A webservice where you can upload and view picles on the web. More like You Tube.
3. Develop Picle to be a Broadcast Utility
So the user can capture, upload and share to the world as .mov files
Whilst weighing these up and debating the pros and cons of each we also have to take into consideration that we are developing in a lean way and we also have to ship our client work. It would be lovely to dedicate all of our resources on getting all of the above optimised, but we must priorities and choose what features are achievable. As Tim mentioned in this post
Let's be really honest - we're a small product innovation and service design company with clients. Our model is to help clients make their own product and services and we're not set up to launch and operate our own.
We decided that focusing on just 1 of the above directions isn't the best way to use our resources, it is in fact a mixture of 1 & 2.
The reasoning for this is that building a stream a la Instagram for the iPhone is quite a large undertaking and not the best use of our limited time and resources. We also know that with the app we have a creeping technical debt as we are adding new features onto what is essentially a prototype base. This means that we will have to do a re-write of the app fairly soon and building something of that size within the app would rack up lot more debt that we will have to deal with later. And if we were just to focus the web service, it would mean that the difficulty of sharing, finding others and the UX of the app would not be resolved.
The web service's player is something that we have had a lot of feedback for. As we don't have a stream on the app yet the web service is the platform to consume the content created by other users. In order to make that consumption of content better we will be working on improving the playback for the player. There is work going on in the back to improve the gapless playback and experience that I can't show yet, but here is one of the designs we have sketched up that will improve the experience.
To address the feedback we have received about communities we looked at what sharing currently means on the app. At the moment a user can share to Twitter, Youtube and email, but cannot find other users on the web service or app. We created this story to articulate the user's journey
'As a user I want to create a log in and connect my account through Facebook + Twitter connect, or through email.'
Lots of sites and apps are doing this in lots of different (and there is another blogpost in the pipeline about that). The pictures below show a prototype of how we are re-working the user journey on the app so that you can find other people through Twitter and Facebook.
These new features will enable people to find out who else is using Picle, as I have mentioned before the ability for people to discover and share is absolutely key to the experience of Picle.
So that is a much distilled update from the discussions we have been having here about Picle, as ever if you have feedback don't hesitate to get in touch with us on the usual social media channels. Or if you want to email do get in touch with Ana at ana@madebymany.co.uk.