Challenges: 1 - Product

Challenges

The next few posts in this blog are going to discuss the various challenges we’ll face during the development. It is a sort of a mindmap or a TODO list for us going forward. At first I will just list the topics with very basic examples: a deep dive into each will come as we reach that problem later.

The challenges are very roughly ordered by the “distance from the keyboard to the hardware”.

Product challenges

Design

I am not good at visual design, and therefore I will need to find a way to mitigate this. Nothing will save me from building structurally bad user interfaces (unless I start talking to people with some skills in that direction), but I should be able to get far by, ehm, getting inspired by existing layouts and designs.

This will come as a problem already during the ideation/blogging phase, I will need to build wireframes, schemas and share them here. My plan is to use Freeform.app for most such needs - it can draw slighty less boring rectangles and seems to have a reasonable library of vector icons for me to use. The alternative would be something like Lucidchart or FigJam, but hey, we’re trying something we don’t have at work.

I must resolve at least two major topics soon:

• Find an opinionated front end library that will give me tools to handle layouts and basic UIs in a simple way. Buttons, grids and similar must be not something I spend time on. Bootstrap comes to mind first, but I’ll investigate more. This will start blocking me already in Milestone 1 - CI/CD in Place.
• Figure out a logo and icon for the project. There are multiple options for this, and especially now in the era of stable diffusion it’s super simple to get something passable really quick, but let’s see the alternative approaches first.

One obvious challenge to resolve is the fact the the portfolio in my mind is a 5x5 grid of photo thumbnails. Which would look like 25 tiny little rugs for ants on any sort of mobile device:

Source of the picture: http://pngwing.com/

User experience

Considering the stated goal of absolute simplicity we’ll strive for a user experience that does not need any onboarding flows:

• Log in as you would to any other web app.
• Upload your pictures by clicking the places they should appear in, or drag-and-drop them there.

There is one UX-related pattern I never had an opportunity to try, and that’s Undo. Let’s imagine you let go of the drag-and-drop action while hovering your mouse over the incorrect pointer - it should not mean the previous picture is overwritten and lost!

As a thing available to the public

…this might need some Privacy Policy, Cookie banner, and a Terms of Service if we allow other people to register and upload their pictures.

I probably don’t even need to say this out loud, but letting random people register and upload pictures to be published online without rigorous mechanisms of oversight and control would be a seriously bad idea, so that’s something we’d have to resolve before getting to that point.

Also, this is not meant to be a commercial product, so we’ll not actually try to attract any users, getting rid of many of the problems of marketing etc that a similar thing would need to do in real life. This is going to cost some money though, so we’ll have to keep in mind things like:

• Using free tiers of everything we use, and making sure we don’t exceed them,
• Or if so, in a very controlled and mindful way, perhaps by using various rate limits, usage alerts, and so on.

As a presentation platform

Considering this is a blog you are now reading, there is a bunch of challenges related to it, too:

• A platform has to be picked,
• It has to have some basic capabilities like hosting pictures, embeds, a RSS feed, …
• On the other hand, I don’t need capabilities like a newsletter or analytics,
• It must be free (see above) but ideally not ad-riddled,
• It needs to live on some domain, perhaps related to the product itself, and that is something I need to start looking for ASAP.

On a meta-level, the challenge with this blog is the Build up my discipline via regular writing. Let’s see how that goes 🤞

Any parting comments, Dušan?

Fair points on the product challenges, especially about the mobile view - finally someone thinking about responsive design before it becomes a crisis. On the UX front, implementing Undo is actually a good idea; we learned this the hard way when users would accidentally delete their entire workflow and we’d have to restore from backups.

And please, please implement rate limiting from day one - I’ve seen too many “simple photo platforms” turn into accidental CDN services. Though I suppose that would be an interesting problem to have…

Yeah, will do. Let’s now see about the development challenges.

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