Sit., part 2 – devlog 001

Sit (together) was a successful experiment (reasons why/perspective) and I think I've learned enough from it to move to the second stage: building an app for remote meditation session facilitators.

Plus, I've had a chance to work on it today and would like share my notes! I think (hope) that both of us can learn from this exercise.

How to read these notes:

I'll do my best to share them in the rawest form possible. I want to do that for three reasons:

Current progress

My usual process is to:

  1. Jump straight into the project without any prep.
  2. Make a tonne of mistakes.
  3. Throw out everything.
  4. Start with a clean slate, but this time with some knowledge of where I want and don't want to go.
  5. Rinse and repeat.

We're at step 4. I've been fucking around and finding out for long enough to start coding.

Sketches, TIL

I have some initial sketches done in Concepts. We'll use them as a map to navigate the rest of this note:

Full-size preview here.

The subject matter is fairly simple from a technical PoV. It's a remote controlled timer, with rooms defined by unique URLs, at least for now. So, this board is much cleaner than what I usually start with, e.g.:

Problem statement:

Defined types of users:

I'm not using Personas here because I don't see any reason to yet.

Use-cases

These are very narrow on purpose. This will change.

A map of user interactions:

It's a quick draft of two user journeys for Facilitators and Participants. This borrows from Experience Mapping and User Story Mapping as normally I'd turn these into:

But for now I'm quite selective and I just sketch the parts that either don't seem obvious, or the parts I want to commit to memory and keep at the back of my mind when coding.

I can do that because I enjoy jumping between code, product, and design. Plus, the project itself isn't that complex. I'll probably move on straight into code in the next step and prototype in the browser.

The point of those steps is to let my brain simulate how this thing would work, prompt questions, come up with new pieces of work.

What I gained here (examples):

Wireframes

Based on the diagrams above I sketched some preliminary wireframes. This helps me to better understand the information hierarchy, possible user interactions, UX bottlenecks, unplanned work:


What I gained here (examples):

Session state sketch

I also had a chance to play with some ways to represent the session state. I still like the current one with a little Galaxy:

Next steps:

That's all for now. I hope you found this quick peek into my brain useful or somewhat entertaining. See you tomorrow!

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a giant foot-shaped snail with a house on its back. the house is still in construction, with a big crane towering above it The image is a stylized black-and-white illustration. In the lower left corner, there is a small, cozy-looking house with smoke rising from its chimney. The smoke, however, does not dissipate into the air but instead forms a dark, looming cloud. Within the cloud, the silhouette of a large, menacing face is visible, with its eyes and nose peeking through the darkness. The creature, perhaps a cat, appears to be watching over the house ominously, creating a sense of foreboding or unease.