Critical UX insight (and pirate eraser!)
Since we got back to work on Trippything a few weeks ago, Elliot’s been busy getting the back-end code base into a whole new, improved shape, which will allow him to spend less time building stuff from scratch which has already allowed us to make faster progress on the unique elements of Trippything platform.With all this new progress on the backend, Elliot has even been able to start work on the front-end of Trippything. There’s still nothing tangible to show you, dear reader, but there will be soon enough, and in the meantime, in Elliot’s bedroom and mine there are small piles of front-end pencil mockups growing. On Elliot’s laptop (and also on the backup) there are the beginnings of a real interface that he and I can click on and get some simple interaction out of.In the last week or two Elliot’s been struggling with a bunch of stuff related to the complexity of displaying a helpful view of your travel itinerary. For most of this journey we’ve assumed that we’d need to present your itinerary in a calendar view. It might not seem like a big deal but doing a great job of a calendar user interface is big and complex. Outlook, iCal, gCalendar — these things were built by large, well-funded, multi-skilled teams. Elliot and I are two multi-skilled people.
Today we had a Team Trippything Moment and realised that we’re actually not designing a calendar user interface at all, we’re designing a list! It sounds trivial but it’s actually very significant – it simplifies our user experience design problem immensely.
These are the kinds of discoveries you make when you use a pencil with a pirate eraser on the end.