Today was Kickoff Day, the first time we gather to actually work on our product. We spent the morning on a presentation on startups, iterations and an intro to manufacturing. We then proceeded to setup Trello, which will be our tool of choice to manage this project.
In the afternoon, we moved on to define what would be our Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the minimum set of functions that our product must cover to be valuable to our customers. In our case, we defined three main items: UV exposure measurement, notify the user when he’s above a given threshold, and communicate with the users’ phone for setup.
We will work on those functions very early in the process, to minimize risks associated to those functions. This will give us a prototype that we will use to properly dimension the battery of the device (another key point!). We decided not to work on the inter-device communication yet and to do it later, if time allows (software rules).
We then mixed the teams and grouped by field of expertise to discuss what was worrying us in our specific domains. That was an interesting way to quickly gather ideas from others and draw attentions to parts we may have overlooked.
The last workshop of the day was the construction of a cardboard mockup. The goal was to quickly create a tangible object illustrating the interaction with our product. It was pretty cool to be able to interact with our project for the first time, even if only on cardboard. It also gave us an idea of what was an acceptable size for the device.
Our device mockup, worn on the wrist. The green part represents the sensing surface.
Our device can also be attached to clothing.
Complete mockup of our system, including the device, one attachment (wrist) and the phone app mockup.
The device can be worn as a necklace as well.
In pure CHIC fashion, we closed the day the day over some pizza and beer, while presenting our cardboard mockups to other teams and CHIC alumni.