• Huddle (1)
• MyBuilder (6)
• Seatwave (7)
• Wonga (8)

Hopefully we’ll continue to work with clients like these over the coming years, it’s always great working for clients like MyBuilder when they were at such an early stage.

Could it be you?

Can you see yourself or your company in the 2011 list? Need help designing or developing your product? Get in touch now to see how Caffeinehit can help you.

We’ve thrown our support behind the guys as they attempt to travel from Plymouth to Timbuktu in a Bedford Rascal (yeah, good luck with that!). The site should be live towards the end of September packed with social features and some interesting mobile functionality enabling progress updates from the most remote places.

Updates coming soon!

Our latest project at Caffeinehit HQ was the DrinkingWorldCup. The idea, which arrived during a lovely sunny lunch in mid-May, was to provide real-time drinking challenges to people watching the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa. As I write this, the tournament is only in its third week and there are still many more games to be played before the conclusion on July 11th. Unfortunately, the DrinkingWorldCup hasn’t had quite the response we had hoped for so we thought it would be good to get our thoughts down while they were still fresh.

Premise

With only a month until the World Cup kicked off, we knew we had to keep things simple. We agreed straight away to develop both a website and an iPhone app; the website would be suited to playing at home and the iPhone app for playing at the pub. After that, it was fairly simple to come up with the idea of setting real-time drinking challenges for people (for example, if there was a foul then the person should take a drink).

An incomplete action

With the basic premise settled, we brainstormed some more ideas before deciding on our initial features:

• People choose a team to play for
• Every time that team makes a mistake or does something note-worthy during the game, everyone playing for that team will be assigned a certain number of drinks to consume
• Players can choose to complete the action or skip it by selecting the respective button
• At the end of the match, a report would be generated from the data we collected

What went right?

As with all Caffeinehit Lab projects, we wanted to use DrinkingWorldCup to experiment. If experimentation was used to determine the success of projects then I would say we succeeded. While using Django to develop the site wasn’t very novel (it is our web framework of choice), we did choose to use MongoDB instead of a more traditional RDBMS like MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.

By using MongoDB, we were able to play around with the database layout quickly and easily since schema changes were cheap to do. In a highly time-constrained project like this, having flexibility in the database schema was very useful as we were able to iterate quickly. MongoDB database files are also portable (a property shared with SQLite) which made deployment simpler. The only real hiccup occurred when we realised the 32-bit version was limited to a 2Gb database.

To get Django and MongoDB working together we used MongoEngine. All in all, it was a breeze to use but you’ll need to make some very simple changes to your Django settings.py.

Because we were building an iPhone app, and because the website made heavy use of AJAX, we needed to develop an API. A good API must be useful and the best way to do this is by initially implementing a minimal set of features and then adding new endpoints upon request. It’s easy to assume you know what data people want and how it will be used but this is rarely the case (see Facebook). We discussed the basic API and it was only extended when we had a specific use case for more data.

Alen Mujezinovic: 15:30:41
    Endpoints:
        /fixtures/
        /actions/<game_id>/(?last=<action_id>)

Tom Drummond: 15:44:36
    We need a rules endpoint in the api (to display in the app)

Alen Mujezinovic: 15:46:33
    Endpoints:
        /fixtures/
        /actions/<game_id>/(?last=<action_id>)
        /rules/

In a way, the lack of time was beneficial - for development at least. We launched without a huge amount of testing and a number of features not implemented which, as a developer, is a painful process. But it meant we could see what worked and what didn’t work with real people. Taking our cue from other alcohol based websites, we created a welcome screen asking visitors to confirm their age and login through Facebook. Based on the logs, we figured that this wasn’t helping us or our visitors. They didn’t know what the site was about before logging in and we were getting fewer people through the gates, so to speak. Needless to say, we quickly rejigged the flow of the website so people were able to browse before signing up.

This iterative development allowed us to focus on the features that actually mattered to our users rather than what we thought mattered.

So, what happened?

After some discussion we agreed there were two main reasons why DrinkingWorldCup wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped: the subject matter & poor PR. During development and testing, we had a lot of fun playing the game amongst ourselves and our friends yet we found it difficult to convey this to people browsing the website. Despite having hundreds up people logging in, only a small handful ever participated in matches.

In hindsight we realised that it’s actually quite a challenging problem to create something that compliments the user’s primary focus of attention. Using the website or app was probably too much of a distraction when watching the actual games; paying attention to a secondary screen - especially if you had friends around - was too much of an inconvenience. We also noticed that even when people joined a game by selecting a team, they often would not complete any actions (by selecting either the “Done” or “Skip” buttons).

Our other problem was getting people to know about it. Due to a lack of time we didn’t invest any effort into PR until it was too late. We also believed it would benefit from word-of-mouth but that didn’t really happen. When we did eventually attempt a PR push (several days after the World Cup began) we were informed that it would be difficult to get any major press because of the subject matter. This, unfortunately, was something we had foreseen.

What we learnt?

Apart from the obvious (e.g. new development skills), we learnt about user behaviour and how not to design a product that won’t be the user’s primary focus. We realise now that if your app is only going to be devoted a small fraction of the user’s attention then you must design accordingly. Do not expect your user to take an active interest by asking them to complete actions. Asking users to push buttons was necessary for us to generate interesting match report pages but was it really necessary from the user’s perspective? Probably not.

We also learnt that we need to pay more attention to PR. We are not PR people and doing all that kind of thing distracts from what we love doing (building awesome products). But it is necessary. Being the kind of people we are, it has always felt wrong to promote our stuff before it’s ready but that doesn’t seem to be the best way to do PR work. To help overcome our PR deficiency we have created a set of processes when building new products. It will almost certainly require tweaking but we believe it will be positive step. We’re working on a new project at the moment which we’ll test it on and after that, we’ll post our results and detail what the process is.

A little nip here and a little tuck there and hey-presto the new blog was born. As well as the design refresh expect a lot more content to be coming your way, Andy hadn’t done a blog post for nearly a year (shocking) so we’re aiming to do at least one or more insightful posts a week from here on in.

DrinkingWorldCup game using real-time events launches

17th June, 2010, London, England: Caffeinehit - a design and development company based in Shoreditch, London - has created a truly unique drinking game for the World Cup.

Called DrinkingWorldCup, the game launched Friday 11th June 2010 on the opening day of the World Cup. It is based on real-time events during each match at this year’s World Cup in South Africa. The game is an iPhone app (http://drinkingworldcup.com/iphone) and website (http://drinkingworldcup.com) that allows football fans to combine two of their favourite things: drinking AND football. Users can play wherever they are - at home, the office or just down the pub - as long as they’re old enough (obviously).

The game is aimed at football fans around the world as a way of enhancing their World Cup.

Caffeinehit founder Andy Ashburner explains:

“We’re massive football fans at Caffeinehit HQ - as well as being partial to a drink or two - so we felt it made sense for us to use our experience as website and iPhone developers to create a fun and interactive product. After an intensive period of R&D we came up with DrinkingWorldCup - the world’s only real-time drinking game.”

By choosing a team to represent before kick-off users will be assigned real-time actions through the app or website. For example: “Rooney just told the ref to f**k off” would result in the user drinking 4 gulps of their chosen tipple.

At the end of each game users can compare their drinking prowess with their friends, one of whom may even earn Man of the Match. As the tournament progresses, see your profile take shape and worry about the state of your liver after the finals.

Come Friday 18th June, the virtual turnstiles for the England vs Algeria match at DrinkingWorldCup will open at 6:30pm BST. Don’t sit on the sidelines, download the app, support your country and drink for England!

And don’t forget to drink responsibly.

Our new address is:
Caffeinehit Ltd
54 Rivington Street
London
EC2A 3QN

If you’re anywhere nearby pop in for a nespresso podule or game on the Xbox!

MyPhysioRehab.com was a very different project for us. Firstly, it was just development, not really any design. The site itself allows administrators to create injury profiles and gym routines for clients. With a simple CMS administrators can create detailed injury profiles and routines and then email it directly to the client as a PDF.

A really exciting site that we feel has some serious potential. We’re already looking forward to getting stuck into v2.

Having sat in the duldrums for some time and been the victim of stinted additions to the site over a long period of time the G3 site design had been left disjointed, clumsy looking and overloaded with text. Working with the G3 team we stripped down the content and created a more unified site with slick UI and obvious service / product highlights.

The site now has a much simpler site structure and the introduction of photographic and visual elements gives the site a fresher and cleaner and feel.

We’re looking forward to hearing what sort of feedback comes through.

Take a look at the live site at http://g3it.com and some screengrabs here.

So why is this so revolutionary? Well, to be honest it’s not for most of you. It is for me, I missed out on TiVo and the like so here I am, rambling…

Apple TV is quite possibly one of the best (and worst) purchases I’ve made, this year at least. The pure volume of content that they’re starting to get on there is awesome. I know it costs less to buy the DVD’s and have them in ‘real life’ from Amazon or Play but the problem (for me at least) is that I want it NOW!

Saying that Apple TV is great and wonderful and everything is all well and good but there are definitely some improvements that could be made to help suck more cash out of our pockets.

Make the box more eco friendly.

It’s very difficult to switch the box off, on the first software release you used to be able to switch the box off in any menu or even watching movie/tv by simply holding down the menu button. So, rather than faff around and find the top menu I just leave it on, thus increasing my already large carbon footprint.

Suggest content with friends

Now I know this probably isn’t Apple’s cup of tea, having a social network within the Apple TV box BUT it would be great if you could suggest a movie / tv programme to a friend. Having suggested stuff to friends in the past it would be a nice little touch if you could do it from the TV itself.

Apple TV Suggestions

By making more of tracking the content that I am rating (and how I rate it), the content within my favourites and what I’ve purchased it should be able to start to see what sort of stuff I might like. At the moment there’s no use of the suggestion system that they’ve just started to use on iTunes. It could be so much more powerful if you have more than the “people who purchased this also purchased…”, that only goes so far and really doesn’t make the most of what Apple TV knows about me.

Review content via Apple TV

Now this wouldn’t have to be a full on review, a simple star rating system for you to review what you’ve just watched.

Marking purchases

One thing that annoys me is that if I’m buying programmes from a series I have to check back with My TV programmes to check what I have or haven’t got yet. I know it comes up with an alert if you are re-buying something but that could be quite time consuming. If there was a simple icon next to an episode you’ve bought.

Alerts

For example I’m watching Season 5 of Entourage and Season 6 is out in December on Apple TV. It would be great if I could either pre-order a season pass or simply get a little alert when I next turn the box on letting me know that it’s now available for download.

Another nice touch would be to have the ability to flag movies you’d like to watch or download using Apple TV when they’re realeased. I know that there could be a horrific amount of time inbetween when you watch a movie trailer to when it’s actually released but you never know it could be quite useful. Maybe just having the ability to ’save a trailer’ into a favourites folder would be enough.

Season Passes

Now these are all well and good but generally I use Apple TV to discover new programmes that have either been suggested to me by a friend, I’ve wondered what it was like or I actually know I want to watch it. The problem with a season pass or buying an entire series is that you don’t want to fork all that cash out on something you’re not sure you’d like.

At the moment if I buy two episodes of a TV series and I then decide that rather than either going through and buying each episode individually I want to get a season pass or buy the entire series. The problem with this is that if you do that you are paying AGAIN for the episodes you originally bought. All good for Apple I’m sure but it’s a bit of a piss take to charge you twice!

Ordering programmes

Looking through my list of TV programmes for some reason is displays various seasons of programmes in random orders. I want it to display the most recent first (or last), I want to have the choice to do both.

I think the most interesting thing is what exactly is going to happen when the UK goes fully digital in 2012. Who would want to pay a license fee to the BBC when they can get all of this other content over the web directly into their televisions. I’d much rather fork out the equivalent for the license fee on some sort of license for my Apple TV. At least then you’re not going to have a few over-paid fuckwits like Jonathan Ross but hopefully see it spread out more evenly across the industry.

Either way I love my Apple TV, the biggest problem is the damage that it’s doing to my credit card!

Following on from the relaunch of Qype last week I think TrustedPlaces has the upper hand, visually (obviously). Still a long way to go but with the site bringing in close to 1,000,000 uniques a month it’s just going from strength to strength.

As with all social networks it’s going to be interesting to see the reaction of the community that use it. When the latest version of Facebook was released the general feeling was that it wasn’t any better, maybe more confusing if anything else. Fingers crossed the reaction will be different in this case, with a much cleaner product it should make finding and understanding content a lot easier.

Either way, well done guys. The site’s looking great and I know that it’s just going to get better based on the plans you’ve got and the super team you’ve got working on the product.

Check out the new look TrustedPlaces here.