Start Up Camp: Usability in the Fast Lane

By Ricardo Escalon-Jimenez, 10 October, 2008

Trying to start a Web business with a team of strangers and include user-centred design over a single weekend is next to impossible. But, that is exactly what I had to do last weekend at the Melbourne Start Up Camp.

About Melbourne's Start Up Camp

Start Up Camp is an initiative by Bart and Kim, from TJoos.com, to get professionals from a variety of fields to work together to create a Web business in a weekend. This process includes press releases, a business plan and a working site, all in one weekend.

Different teams had different approaches to working together and as a team ours went through the ups and downs of team formation. For my team, it was like an episode of The Apprentice, you know, the loudest person wins the argument. The argument was so heated, that one of our team members had to be re-assigned to another team. However, we pulled through and created our business idea.

On this weekend, 3 businesses were created:

MarketBeagle, marketting for the massess. A Webside that helps small businesses understand their marketing efforts better. www.MarketBeagle.com

An SMS meeting service. At the airport? If so let them know and they’ll hook you up with a bit of pluck to talk to a stranger. www.ABitofPluck.com

Play indoor sports? Who are you playing next week? Are they any good? Find out at iSporster.com, your indoor story. iSportster.com

Usability in the fast lane

I was involved with iSportster.com, and I was using user centred practices, combined with agile methodologies to deliver requirements for the programmers to start coding. The question that I had to answer quickly was:

What can I do in such a short time to deliver a user friendly solution?

My approach to this question was

Work on a problem with a familiar domain

Around 3 of the 6 members had played indoor sports before, and one was currently playing indoor sports. They served as domain experts throughout our requirements gathering stage.

Model the user and their goals/tasks

If the context of how the website will be used is not understood the team would have looked at it as a set of features, with information or data driving its design. Instead, we wrote brief personas and scenarios to understand how someone might use the site. These were then used to brainstorm the features to facilitate the scenario, effectively letting the user drive the design.

Easy to implement visual design to leave time for usability improvements

I designed some wireframes and produced some visual designs that were modelled on an existing CSS framework. This meant that I could easily train other people how to code for it and we could implement it in record time. This left some time in the end to tackle some of the usability problems that emerged through the evolution of the product.

What would you like to read next?

There is so much more I could write about the lessons that I learnt over the weekend. But, being a user experience sort of guy, I’ll leave the questions to you. Let me know what you are interested in by leaving a comment on this post. Some ideas include:

• What did developers and business people at Start Up Camp think usability was?
• How do user experience professionals define usability?
• How did the development of iSporter turn from user centred to data centred?

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