Features

To sort all thoughts and ideas that we’ve had around urban biking lately, we decided to do an analysis. We got all our thinking around the bike ride up on the wall, categorized it, and then tried to identify features that could be a part of our thesis product. It took most of today to map our thoughts to the wall, and we took a photo shoot break somewhere in the middle of it all:

The wall ended up covered in post-its, and we’ve made a separate blog entry listing the content just to document it. We continued to work with the opportunities identified on Monday, trying to find some common themes, and to decide what fits into the core of our concept, what are nice-to-haves, and which features we can leave behind.

Here are our features grouped:

Then we escaped the studio, took a quick bike ride to a café we’ve wanted to visit for a while – Tea & Sympathy. Over a cup of tea and some bangers and mash we discussed the key features of our product. Here are our notes from that chat:

We will publish a more polished concept map later. But from working with this material for while it’s clear that Wayfinding is our core, and that Tracking is in a good second place, followed by integration to some Location Service like Yelp or Google Places. We’re also quite interested in exploring the Group Ride aspect. If we list all the feature groups we have identified through this exercise, this might be our list somewhat prioritized:

Wayfinding
Tracking
Personalization/discovery/places
Group ride
Social
Character
Not going from A to B
Maintenance
Safety
Civic engagement
Sharing/advocacy
Entertainment
Socialize with strangers
Weather
Need mic
Need GPS
Commercial

We will narrow this down, but as long as we know our focus, we’re one step closer to an awesome product. Yeah!