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Field Notes
Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.
Sep
1st
2011
All good things start with a prototype...
Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re all enjoying the late summer (or winter for our antipodean friends)!
Thanks so much to our community from myself
and the OpenIDEO team for taking this journey with us on OpenIDEO, as we design better, together. That
motto goes for the challenges we tackle together, as well as for the design and
evolution of the OpenIDEO platform itself.
You may have noticed in the past year some small & large evolutions of the platform. We want you to know that OpenIDEO is a living, breathing platform, constantly improving and creating impact with the help of our community.
With our latest design refresh now launched, I wanted to give you some insight into our process of evolution and the work that goes on behind-the-scenes.
We keep it agile
Since our launch a year ago, we’ve been perfecting our agile process of launching new features and designs on a 6-8 week cycle. Our amazing developers have worked tirelessly to code new functionality and fix bugs. I’ve also had the pleasure to work with some pretty talented designers, who have taken a break from their regular IDEO gig to join us on OpenIDEO for a bit…
You may have seen Tobias Toft wandering
around the platform, sprinkling his design magic. He started us off on the
latest redesign you see before you and inspired us all with his pixel and code
skills. And be on the look out for Daniel Nacamuli, who has joined us for a few
months from Paris.
Thanks to yourselves and our community managers, Ashley & Meena, we’ve been able to create an ever more stable platform. We’ve also been following your posts to the User Forums and designing new features with you.
When we launched Inspiration Assignments, community guru Vincent Cheng was quick to point out that the term ‘assignments’ felt a lot like homework and suggested we go with something more fun, like Missions. What a great idea! We always knew you were smarter than us.
Alessandro noticed that older submissions weren’t getting as much community love, because new inspirations and concepts pushed them down the list. He had a great suggestion of presenting the most recent few entries at the top and then a random assortment of older entries… which we called Fresh & Surprising. You can now enjoy Fresh & Surprising all the time in our inspiration and concept listings.
Thanks to your passion for creating impact through OpenIDEO, we launched the Realisation Phase, which chronicles the impact stories arising out of your ideas.
It starts with a prototype…
Our team and community are constantly
bubbling with new ideas and features to try out on OpenIDEO. I’m a firm
believer in prototypes & experimentation, and with OpenIDEO, we often
leverage the platform itself to prototype these new features and better inform
our design decisions.
For example on the Maternal Health challenge, you may have seen the addition of a Refinement phase, and the ability to give credit to your virtual team collaborators. Thanks for embracing these prototypes and teaching us a thing or two about collaboration. We were amazed at how generous our community members were in giving credit to others and forming mini-communities around each and every concept. We’re now working hard to make virtual team collaborators a shiny new feature!
You may have noticed some lovely prototypes in the last week on the Evaluation phase of our Impact challenge. Anne Riechert and Ashley have been busy creating new ways to engage the community in evaluation. (Bonus DQ points for spotting those prototypes and telling us what you think!)
On OpenIDEO, all good things start with a prototype. It may be a little rough and tumble, but we know you’re very forgiving and the outcomes always enrich what we go about creating.
We’re also ecstatic to see this ethos of prototyping extending into the community, with Sarah Fathallah starting up the OpenTranslate project via googledocs. So cool to see everyone contributing their efforts to deliver OpenIDEO in different languages, and we’re looking forward to seeing how this prototype evolves.
So what’s coming up?
The latest Impact Challenge has gathered a cornucopia of ideas for us to try out. We have a roadmap of the next few big release we want to do (improving group collaboration and driving individual impact). And we’re looking to sprinkle in a few fab ideas from the challenge and the community suggestions in our User Forums.
We also want to grow the community and fill it with innovators from all different backgrounds and walks of life. Help us by spreading the word about OpenIDEO on your Facebook, Google+ and Twitter networks.
So keep your innovations coming! And keep prototyping with us! OpenIDEO is now a community effort and you’re on the team. We hope to work with you in creating a pretty darn special open innovation platform.
Cheers!
Haiyan
OpenIDEO Design Lead
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September 01, 2011
06:26PM
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