The version of chaopin that we demo'd at Techcrunch Battlefield is now available in the appstore in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan.
Introducing Catalogs
This version adds catalogs to help you organize and arrange the styles you like. For example, if you're in need of a new winter coat, create a winter coat catalog. Add the photos of coats you like so you can use it for reference later when you are off shopping.
Another good example is for weddings. Create a catalog of inspiring wedding dresses which you can take to the designer or shop of your choice so that they have a good idea of what type of dress you are after!
There are lots of different reasons to create catalogs. Need a new evening dress? Have a party to attend? New jumper for winter? Planning a beach vacation?
Every now and then, it's good to take a break and do something different. Some companies, such as Facebook, do this with Hackathons. We did this to test if we could work using different development processes and to see what we could make.... to test our engineering and design skills.
The Experiment
Could we create, design and develop an app that allows us to test the China market?
Market Test
The China market is a different online animal to the West, and with our experience in photos, we wanted to test how it is different from the West, how people created, consumed, shared photos in social media services. With this in mind, we asked the following broad question -
How do people using Sina Weibo (Twitter equivalent in China) share/view photos?
Internal Test
We didn't want to spend a long term working on this, so a 2 week time frame was chosen to design, build and develop from the ground up. The question we wanted to ask was -
Could we create an app within 2 weeks, that is still beautiful, easy to use and helps answer the questions we had?
Idea Generation
We began with a few theories, that people in China are too busy to take photos in the same way that people in Japan and the West do. Cities are sprawling and those who regularly access social media have less interest / inclination to take/share photos. A little bit of study on Sina Weibo showed that people like to consume and re-share photos. Finally we reached an idea for an app that would help us to test a few assumptions/hypothesis -
People using Sina Weibo want a good photo viewing experience.
They are more likely to connect with their Sina Weibo account if it's not a pre-requisite.
There is a demand to view and rate fashion themed photos.
Enter Jiepai (Street Fashion)... later renamed to Chaopin (Trendy Fashion)
Viewing street fashion photos seemed quite popular, however the viewing experience isn't great, and just viewing photos is not very interactive, so we came up with an app that makes it a beautiful experience to browse street fashion related photos from Weibo, that allows you to discover and follow the people who are sharing these photos, rate the photos hot or not, see which are the hottest photos and re-share them all on Sina Weibo... All within 2 weeks, this meant designing the UI, coding the UI and interactions, as well as the server backend that stored the ratings and allowed people to connect their Sina Weibo accounts.
Development
We used a design-driven agile development methodology to create a 'minimum viable product'. The developers and designers had control over the process, with the designer creating the UI mockups which were then discussed and split up amongst the developers. Our developers created tasks and divided it amongst themselves to conquer. It was split up into design, server implementation, testing architecture, iphone app development and content curation. We had to gather the sources for good quality photos that could be used for consumption.
Discovery in Progress
During the 2 weeks we discovered a few things that meant adjusting what we were developing.
During the content curation process, we discovered there weren't enough street fashion photos available on Sina Weibo, this meant we had to find photo sources from a larger pool, therefore we adjusted the scope of the app to cover trendy fashion rather than just street fashion.
Changing the focus to trendy fashion meant the app needed to be redesigned to articulate the app's new content. This had an impact on the iphone development because some of the UI elements needed to be redeveloped.
We wanted to keep the 2 week limit, to do this, we had to cut features, therefore the design needed to be adjusted to reflect the slimmed down version.
Lesson Learned... so far
Whilst procuring sources for the photos, it helped point us towards a more appropriate market. This helped us to adjust the focus of the app towards something that had more material and hopefully, a better market fit.
Stripping out features because of the time frame really helped us to focus our thinking about what is really needed for the first test of this "minimum viable app".
Creating an hypothesis to test helped to focus our thinking. What features are needed to test the assumptions?
Going through the process helped us to learn more about this style of development. The Lean Startup methodology (coined by Eric Ries) advocates parts of what we were trying in its process. We are still to go through the customer feedback process and this will help us to know if our assumptions are correct and to do this we have to release the app... That day is today!
