We're live on App Store – ISSUE N.05
Sensive.xyz is available to download for free on App Store (iOS only).
Hello there, thanks for tuning in.
Last week I started telling the story of how we are building Sensive. I’m going to continue telling that story this week. Big shout out to my co-founder Brian, who after more than a month of back and forth with the Apple App Store review team, has managed to get the Sensive App approved. It’s free to download, so give it a whirl and send feedback our way, be brutally honest.
Sensive – Mood Tracking, Part 2
… Maybe it was not such a good idea after all. At this point, Sky Lou also decided to be born. Let’s just say it was not easy to find time on the weekend to focus on Sensive.
This is where we left off last week. Let’s continue the story.
We had run really fast, we were in the early stage of the pandemic and felt unstoppable. Similar to that enthusiasm you have for something when it is new and shiny. We had spent some time on evenings and weekends, and we had made great progress. Not entirely sure what actually happened next. One thing is for sure, tasks started to take a lot longer to complete.
I think it’s fair to say that at this point we had a lot of “what if?” thoughts.
We started investigating and playing around with other ideas (not by any means bad ideas) instead of sticking to the core of what we’ve built. Maybe in hindsight we should have released the app at that point (early June 2020) and learnt in public what people wanted out of it.
I must say personally this is really hard to know at the time. You need to really be comfortable shipping shit essentially, and not worry about what people might think. That brings me to this tweet I posted recently. It’s essentially hard to make shit for yourself. You’re exposed.
Let’s recap what we explored at this point? I just need to take a dive into our time-machine, Figma. Okay got it.
We explored habit tracking, new design on how to better answer your mood states. Different designs for the home screen, journaling, onboarding. We made a dark app design. We then made a light app design. We investigate a very artsy two-dimensional way of dragging both left/right as well as up/down to score your different emotes. We drew illustrations - nice ones, and ugly ones. I focused too much time on making an illuminating border glow on the input fields for the onboarding…. I think this explains why we did not ship, we had no clue what or how to prioritize.
On the contrary to not knowing what to prioritize we had also set out to play.
This is something we believe is very important when building products. To have fun, and play. It’s when playing and being free from the burden of project management, analytics etc that we find ourselves exploring and finding out what really makes a great product.
So while in hindsight we should have shipped earlier, without saying no to play. But the two does not need to be intertwined. I’d almost say that by decoulping them, you’ll find the best possible scenario.
Where you can ship small incremental improvements and big features. While you devote some of your time to play. It does not have to be a true or false scenario. So learning here is to ship early and often, and never stop playing.
We slowly started testing the app in June, but not really until end of July did we have something worth using. I really want to emphasis that we had very little time to get something together. Both me and Brian had our priorities with our day jobs and me with Sky Lou, so definitely hard to find the time needed to move fast.
We did end up doing big quarterly updates for the Beta group, but as you can see from the above curve we did not really see the results we were hoping for. A lesson we learnt here is that it’s probably a lot better to just invite everyone and anyone that’s showing some kind of interest in what you are building.
At this point it’s clear that the hardest lesson learnt is that we should have released the app in the end of July but kept experimenting on our UX/UI while we actually had people benefiting from the app. Helping us identifying use cases and improvements together.
Aug-Dec was the time period where Brian did an awful lot of work that involved both visible work but also non-visible parts. Like re-writing the entire app using Expo. Working out some future features, like integration with Apple Health Kit. Let’s say this was a period where he did a lot of heavy lifting. I’ll let him talk more about his work here in a future post somewhere, or let him hijack this medium.
On my side, during the autumn I went through the most difficult time that I have ever had to endure. It included me unexpectedly losing my dad. That then naturally put this entire project on hold for me. It was just a lot of mentally though things to endure and get through. Not long after that, we got our house broken into, so there was one thing after another. Trying to stay on top of life, and my day job. It was near impossible to find time for Sensive.
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I’ll stop here, and tell the final part next week. Now download Sensive, it’s free. Please send any feedback my way, keen to understand what could be improved.
Clubhouse x Jacuzzi Club
We had another fun Clubhouse chat talking about how to build your own brand universe. Noah Wunsch from Ruby and Emily Miller from OffLimits shared their stories. If you want to join when we do these talks follow the Jacuzzi Club
Curated Design jobs
I’m getting a lot of questions on where to find good senior design jobs, so I thought I’d share some with you. If you’re not directly interested you might have a designer in your network that might be. Share this with them.
Product Designer, Retool, San Francisco
Senior Product Designer, Clutter, Los Angeles
Senior Product Designer, Noom, New York
Product Designer, Citizen, Remote
This week’s tidbits
Blue-eyes can be traced back to a single origin and are no older than 10.000 years. Thanks, Daniel for this lecture.
You should get Andri Snær Magnason book On Time and Water. Watch this short Ted Talk too.
Gap has a billion-dollar ambition for Yeezy, deal with Kanye West.
Trying to get rid of stress can cause more stress… Go figure.
Ólafur Arnalds is playing a Tiny Desk (home) Concert. Beautiful.
The one and only Action Bronson goes to the gym and is back with 👉🏻 F*ck Thats Delicious.
How $20,000 1985 Chicago Air Jordan 1s Are 👉🏻 Professionally Resoled
Little Big released a new song, this band is just killing it. Reminds me a lot about Salvatore Ganacci
Since this is a music-heavy week, I got recommended this playlist by reader Daniel Raffel - And he also sent MYLO Unleather my way (I’ve had my eyes on these guys for some time now).
Any feedback or ideas on how I can make this better is most welcome.
Thank you for reading.
Written by Linus Ekenstam, a troublemaker at sensive.xyz – You can find me on Twitter & Instagram