Change's Debut / BitMethod's Birthday Bash
by Daniel Shipton in Information, 9 May 2012
It’s here! After incubating Change the past few months in our nest atop the Liberty Building, we are finally ready to deliver a bouncing new baby point of sale system to Mars Cafe. Not only are we celebrating the birth of a new product, but BitMethod is also turning three. This means there will be lots of cake!
Come join us next Thursday, May 17th, from 6:30pm-8:30pm, at Mars Cafe, as we bring our first version of Change into the world and introduce it to its happy new family. To give everyone a chance to see Change in action, Mars is working on some sweet beer specials just for the occasion. Mars Cafe is determined to make our birthday extra happy. They’ll be running Happy Hour prices all night! $2.50 on select beers.
We wouldn’t have made it this far without all your support, so stop by, grab a drink, and come celebrate with us! Also, free cake. Don’t forget the cake.
About the author: Dan is constantly pushing to make interactive products simple and easy to use. He won't stop digging until he finds that sweet spot where design, development and message come together to create an amazing experience for the user.
Reach out to Daniel Shipton at dan@bitmethod.com
Eat Sleep Featured in the App Store for Mother's Day
by Igor Dobrosavljević in Apps and Mobile, 8 May 2012
Over the weekend, our app Eat Sleep was featured in the Apple App Store for Mother’s Day under apps for “Moms on the Go.” The first person to notice was @norahcarroll, our friend from LavaRow. We’re so glad her shout out on Twitter gave us the heads up.
The most exciting part for us was seeing the hockey stick growth on our daily downloads chart. In the first two days, downloads quadrupled and we are excited to see next week’s numbers after being featured for an entire week.
We put a lot of love into our little passion projects, so we’re incredibly proud to have been recognized by Apple, especially since we did this project to help out moms!
About the author: Igor speaks business, tech, project management, and three other actual languages. He has a knack for hardware, networking, and keeping software guys on their toes.
Reach out to Igor Dobrosavljević at igor@bitmethod.com
Recently, we've had a lot of people express interest in not only what we do at BitMethod, but how we do it. They often want to learn more about our process and what goes into creating mobile apps. If you’re one of these people, we have some good news for you.
Remember those apps we made last year for the 80/35 music festival? Well, July is quickly approaching and we're ready to update the crap out of those things, but this time, we want to share our process with others.
If you're interested in participating in our upcoming 80/35 Sprint Weekend, shoot us an email (hello@bitmethod.com). Tell us a little about yourself and how you would be able to contribute throughout the weekend (design, writing, programming, etc).
This is free to participants and will take place April 27-29.
Please Note: Depending on the response, we might not be able to invite everyone to participate (we will have to get some work done that weekend); however, we're hoping to share this experience with as many people as we can.
About the author: We are mobile experts. We help people design and build useful mobile apps. We swoon over well-made interactive products and love finding ways to make complex things simple.
Reach out to BitMethod at hello@bitmethod.com
Book Review - A Project Guide to UX Design
by Daniel Shipton in , 12 April 2012
Our good friend Russ Unger recently sent us a copy of his newly released book “A Project Guide to UX Design,” co-authored by Carolyn Chandler. Now in its second edition, this book is packed full of little UX gold nuggets. If you’re looking for an awesome guide to help you design user experiences, it would be “A Project Guide to UX Design.”
Russ and Carolyn provide several strategies for tackling the user experience of projects both big and small. For every step of the process, they dish out advice on incorporating research, workflow analysis, personas and insight on how to build things.
Right away, the book claims to not be the “one way” of tackling a project. This is refreshing. Instead of acting as an instruction manual, the chapters read more as helpful words of wisdom on how to improve your existing processes. BitMethod was able to practice a few of these techniques from the wireframing and prototyping sections right away.
Russ and Carolyn also do a great job of defining the typical user experience deliverables. They explain why some are more important than others, depending on the project, and how to use them as a way of proving the value of user experience to the client.
Whether you’re new to user experience or want to find ways of improving upon your current process, “A Project Guide to UX Design” is a great comprehensive text. You get an idea of all the elements involved in user experience and some great perspective on how to approach your next project.
About the author: Dan is constantly pushing to make interactive products simple and easy to use. He won't stop digging until he finds that sweet spot where design, development and message come together to create an amazing experience for the user.
Reach out to Daniel Shipton at dan@bitmethod.com
What We Can Learn From Draw Something
by Amanda Morrow in Apps and Mobile, 5 April 2012
As I’m sure many of you have heard, OMGPOP, the company who created Draw Something, was purchased by Zynga for $210 million back in March.
For those unfamiliar with the game, found on both the iOS and Android platforms, it’s a play on Pictionary. Users choose a word, draw it for a friend, and get them to guess the word by spelling it out from a dozen letters at the bottom of the screen.
The app launched February 1, 2012, and now boasts close to 50 million downloads. While it may seem like Draw Something has been a bit of an overnight success, the actual game is the third iteration of OMGPOP’s flash game Draw My Thing and took about six and a half months to launch.
Draw Something is a pretty simple game. There’s not much to it and after playing a round, or fifty, it’s natural to start developing a wishlist of features you’d like to see implemented.
For instance, sharing. Right now, there is no way within the app to share your stunning portrait of Lady Gaga. Of course, this hasn’t stopped users. They just simply use the screen capture function on their phone and post it online anyway.
But why wouldn’t OMGPOP launch with that? It can’t be that hard to implement. They are already integrated with Facebook anyway.
A few days after the big announcement of their purchase, Draw Something sent out an email to their users announcing some new upcoming features.
When we aren't busy drawing new Hunger Games words or new words like Kung Fu or Green Day here at Draw Something HQ, we have been cranking out new features.
Coming soon are:
- Sharing drawings on Twitter and Facebook
- Save drawings to your devices' photo library
- Notifications for Android devices
- Increase of the max streak from 99 to 999 (you guys are rocking it!)
- Pull down to refresh game status
- UNDO button for your last brush stroke
- Even better performance
- More words
- And a slew of other fixes and tweaks
“Cool,” I thought. “These will improve gameplay tremendously.” Then it hit me, “Whoa, they’ve really thought this through.” Come to find out, they've become masters in iteration and simplification.
Draw Something is by no means perfect in its current form, but were you paying attention? They have reached almost 50 MILLION DOWNLOADS and just sold for $210 MILLION in less than TWO MONTHS.
In this article from Business Insider, Garrett Peek, lead designer of Draw Something, discusses how early iterations included many of the features from the flash version of their game, but they kept cutting, and cutting, and cutting, to get where they are now.
“We took an axe to anything that wasn't fun and ultimately rebuilt the experience several times to enhance the game on mobile. The process was highly iterative.”
Basically, they identified what was truly important to their mobile users based on what they’ve learned from Draw My Thing, then started fresh with a clean slate.
“It's easy to overwhelm a user. The main goal from the beginning was to make Draw Something as fun, intuitive, and easy-to-use as possible -- not an easy task considering most people don't draw on a daily basis.”
If OMGPOP had released the first version of Draw Something with all the features of Draw My Thing, they wouldn’t be where they are today. Heck, they might still be developing a product that would ultimately fail from being overly complex.
The popularity of Draw Something is a great example of how a minimum viable product should work. Identify what’s truly important to your users and execute those key features well. It will allow you to create a solid foundation to build future improvements upon.
Read more from Garrett Peek on how Draw Something was made at BusinessInsider.com:
How Draw Something, The Hit Game 35 Million People Are Playing, Was Made
For more background on OMGPOP, check out Episode 71 of Build and Analyze on the 5by5 network.
Thank you Lyndsay Clark for providing the kickass drawing of a zombie.
About the author: Amanda wants to make the world a less confusing and frustrating place by focusing on good design and user experience. Her goal is to one day see humans and machines peacefully coexist without trying to kill one another.
Reach out to Amanda Morrow at amanda@bitmethod.com