In this post, I am providing a progress status on the development of DayTickler.
As I wrote last June, the first version of DayTickler (the one that we will officially published in the app store) must be a lovable and marketable product. Because we aim at validating if a product/market fit is obtained, we must avoid publishing a prototype.
A prototype is perfect to test for usability because it allows evaluating facts. However, it fails miserably for evaluating usefulness. It is not the appropriate tool to validate the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. As stated by Laura Klein in the article Building the right thing vs. building the thing right, “you can’t use a prototype to learn if you are building the right product.”
The right product is a product that does what we imagined, but it is design so it has what customers really want and need in a form that is easy to use and atheistically pleasing. In order words, the right product is a product that is built “right” or at least “right enough”.
However, as Ron Jeffries wrote in 2014, “You can’t build the right product if you can’t build the product right.”
Therefore, in June and July, we continued to validate our design with prototypes. As always, we are learning to be humble. Obviously, some of our assumptions were wrong. We found serious problems with the user experience. At such a point that we spent the last month redesigning our application. The good news is that our recent prototype tests are conclusive. We are on the right track.
When will you have access to DayTickler in the app store? Not until November. We must build the product “right” and to reach that goal we need to do more usability testing.
Mario Cardinal 