Working in an office involves a lot of debate, consideration and throwing out of ideas. Suggestions are brought forwards and then pulled apart, finding flaws and jumps in logic until the finished product is something that the collective generally agree might be possible or the idea is discarded entirely.

The problem with this method is that a lot of very good ideas can be lost because “it can’t be done” is used to mask “it hasn’t been done before” and the latter is often because “it hasn’t been tried before”. Even if that is not the case, things change and past experiences can be rendered inaccurate. Back when I was a student running events and being involved in the radio station we would decide something was a good idea and push through it – overcoming obstacles along the way forced us to create innovative solutions and all on a tight budget (because everything back then was on a tight budget). We found alternative means of funding events, worked at unusual marketing campaigns and forged links with people who had expertise we did not have and needed. It was very exciting and we achieved things that baffled some of the more experienced people who later remarked that what we were doing shouldn’t have been possible.

The point of all this? Moving to an office puts certain expectations on one’s behaviour which seems to quell some of these instincts. One of the great things about our Get Creative events is that the only “it can’t be done” limitations are “what will everyone do” and “we cannot achieve that in the time limit”. Whilst these do kill off some very good ideas (Kelvin’s FaceTent idea is one I regret not doing) it leaves a great deal of freedom to “just try it”. Today we went out and interviewed some students about our inPictures app and captured it on video. We did not discuss the questions at length, we did not worry about how to approach them, we did not put out a call for volunteers, we didn’t even worry too much about what we wanted to learn ahead of time. We simply went out and talked to people, making it up as we went along. It took two people roughly two hours and we learned a great deal and will probably use our experiences in future projects as well as this one.

So what I am saying is: try things. Be creative. Challenge what can be done. We are all used to doing this whilst creating things for the internet – do it with your office processes as well. In the words of George Bernard Shaw (or quoting an ancient Chinese proverb, depending on which site you read):

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

Get Creative is about us trying new things so this week Tom Natt and I have been getting out and talking to our users.

Whilst we value the use of personas, user stories and user testing we don’t really get out enough and just chat to people about what we’re doing and what they’d expect from it. So today, armed with our camera and notepad, we went out and asked a few questions.

Some of the things we learnt which will affect what we do next…

• People would be motivated by their friends using it – we need to make it more social!
• No need to build in functionality for upload via a phone (eg. iPhone) at this stage – we felt it was very important.
• Consider how this will appeal and be accessed by Alumni – we were thinking more about current students and staff
• Batch upload is important – earlier in the day we decided it wasn’t

We could have spent a lot longer chatting to people but as an exercise it worked really well. We captured video footage of our interviews (using our flip) and came back armed with notes and ideas. It was incredibly useful to hear people describe what would motivate them to use the site, where they’d look for it and how they’d expect to use it.

Whilst we’ve only got a limited set of information for this project this is certainly an exercise we’ll build into our future developments. It taught us a valuable lesson that we can’t just assume we know what people want!

Despite having half a team we’ve got an app working at the end of day one! It still needs more work but you can see where we’re going with it.

More next week!

The whole point of Get Creative is that is forces us to work in different ways. So at the end of day one I thought I’d ask the team what we feel we’ve done differently and what we’ve learnt.

Unfortunately, for various reasons, we’re half a team down today so we only have six of us in the office!

What have we done differently?

• Committed to work based on “I will be the person that…“
• Had lunch together – pizza and then a walk to burn the pizza off!

What have we learnt?

• Sometimes it’s ok to go straight for a plugin we know about without spending lots of time evaluating all the options. If we know it’ll do the job then that’s good enough.
• Yvonne has learnt to define the personality of a web application
• Anil learn to use balsamic
• Andy Male learnt he quite likes vegetarian pizza

What should we make sure we do / don’t do next week?

• Perhaps work more closely together… some of us (myself included) have tended to go off and work on things in isolation
• Try and get more of the team in!

If you’re interested in what we’re doing keep and eye on this blog and follow us on Twitter.

As we use Scrum for all our projects we are used to planning and delivering projects in a certain way. With Scrum the planning process starts by writing down all the things we want to deliver (based on user stories) and from there creating a backlog of work. This is then estimated, prioritised and the team commit to the work (a Sprint).

For Get Creative we are chopping this down quite a bit as an experiment. We started this morning with a brief discussion about what we wanted to do and then went straight into committing to the work. We have decided to use a simple “I will be the person that” approach whereby each person says what they’ll take responsibility for and takes the work on.

This morning we agreed what we would commit to today and after lunch we caught up on what we had achieved. To make this a bit more interesting we are using childhood or very old pics to identify ourselves…

	I will be the person that…
Alison Kerwin (nee Wildish)	Maps our childhood pics to our tasks [COMPLETE] Pulls together a list of events we’d want to do ‘In Pictures’ for [COMPLETE] Writes our first daily blog [COMPLETE]
Andy Male	Investigates using a WordPress plugin to build this [ON-GOING]
Andy Savin	Takes pictures of the campus to launch the app [COMPLETE] Orders our lunch (pizza) [COMPLETE]
Anil Herat	Work with Yvonne to look to define our personality [COMPLETE]
Tom Trentham	Works with Andy Male to investigate the WordPress plugin [ON-GOING] Gets a database [COMPLETE]
Yvonne Aburrow	Looks at the personality we want for our app/sites [COMPLETE]

If you’re interested in what we’re doing keep and eye on this blog and follow us on Twitter.