Weeknotes 1406

Welcome to our first Hoog+Diep long form* week notes. In these notes we give you an insight into our studio life. We believe that sharing what we create and how we create it (as much as our industry’s confidentiality allows) improves our work and, when done right, benefits our clients.

Customer touchpoints demos
In week 6 of 2014 Mattijs and Tjeerd continued to build two wonderful demos for Umshuwalense showing two customer journeys over multiple touchpoints. We got to go through the MVP version of the different software parts that facilitate the journey during our sprint review. The overall experience is already feeling solid and well polished and we are looking forward to sharing it with our client. We are also pleased with the flexibility and speed with which nodejs and angularjs allow us to build and we will evaluate the process and tools in more detail once we are done.

Next Train release

On Tuesday we celebrated the official release of Next Train NL as one of the launching apps of the Pebble appstore. Opening up the smart watch app from our test panel to the general train traveling public in the Netherlands was an exiting step.

The first reactions on Tjeerd’s wonderful design and execution were very positive and during the week we kept one eye on the statistics to see how the app was used.

Contendis upgrade
While this was going on, Wouter coordinated an update to the full Contendis platform. Apps, editor and global content distribution network were upgraded to remove a few rare but very annoying bugs. Most fans were not affected by the bugs and after updating their app, all fans should once again have seamless content updates.

THIXD14
Thursday evening Pieter co-hosted the special This happened IXD14 edition in Amsterdam. There were four intriguing talks and Q&A sessions which will soon be available as videos:

  • Marie de Vos – STBY – talked about improving travelers’ experience of train platforms.
  • Christian Eckert & Andreas Wegner – icon incar – talked about designing a next-generation automotive interface.
  • Pieter Jan Pieters – OWOW – talked about The Social Project
  • Luna Maurer – Studio Moniker – talked about the ever-growing animation film Your Line or Mine

This happened IXD14 - Christian & Andreas
Many international designers joined as part of the evening program of the Interaction14 conference and with inspiring conversations on rapidly changing interaction design disciplines lasting till late it was one to remember. The next This happened will be on March the 10th in Rotterdam. We will be there, so sign up for the newsletter, come and join in.

Txiki
With the technical proof of concept for Txiki done, we are starting step 1 of our 2014 plan. We can’t say too much right now, except that we will open up the project to the public before the summer.

Last but not least we had some interesting conversations with new clients and collaborators before Wouter had to prepare for his snowboarding break this week.

* We tried shoving a week’s work into a single #weektweet over the past weeks, but 140 characters resulted in a list of #s and @s which only made sense to us.