Come on.
Admit it.
You've been dying to know more about our development process. Yea, we know. We like to maintain some degree of mystique around our top secret plans for how we are going to make the site even more amazing than it already is. So, to quell your curiosity this blog post will offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how we operate here at myJambi (only a "glimpse" because we want to hammer out some more cool features before we give you the whole picture. You know, just so there isn't suddenly a "myJimbi" site that magically appears out of nowhere. That would kinda ruin our whole plan.).
Well, first what happens is that the head honchos—Kristina, Rio and David—all get together and brainstorm over large scale objectives of what they want to get done on the site. For instance, do we want to have video? Or, should we give our users the ability to upload mp3s? From there, they get into the nitty gritty details about which of these things are actually feasible and if the new feature will help us reach our business objectives. Once they've determined which features have made the cut, they then make some rough sketches of what those features might look like.
They start by mocking up something on paper with cool little drawings (sometimes phantom stick figures find their way into the pages, and we haven't quite figured out how they got there and what their purpose is). Truth be told, Rio and David share the task of mapping out these new features in drawings, but of course, they differ on exactly how they approach it. Rio prefers the simple pleasures of printer paper and the occasional yellow legal pad, while David is a devotee of his special black notebook (known to some as "moleskin," supposedly pronounced "molehskin," although he's French so he could be lying about that). Once they have the basic idea down of what they want to try and achieve, they make up a nifty PowerPoint that fleshes out more concretely the feature and the main templates associated with integrating that feature into the current site designs. David then meets with our trusty designer Tasha at a Starbucks (we won't disclose the location, as we have been having a problem with rabid fans as of late) and goes through the PowerPoint with her over Chai Lattes, as they try to ignore the mind-numbing sound of Starbucks' mix blasting the same songs over and over and over and over and over again.
Days of toil ensue as the designs are drafted, redrafted, brought back to the team for a round table discussion, which mostly occurs at an oval shaped table in our office. We debate back and forth the placement of copy, buttons, and images on each page, as we try to determine how to create the best experience for our users—whether they be our friends who spend all day in front of their computer screens or some of our parents who get flustered every time they open a browser window.
Want an example? Sure you do!
We just launched the address book import feature, which we are really excited about. It started kind of as a 'hopeful' feature, like The Little Engine That Could, which we threw into a design with the thought that it would be great to immediately contact all your friends and so you could automatically expand your myJambi network without a lot of effort. There was a time when we were pretty much sure that the feature was shelved because we just had too many other fixes and fun features that we needed to have built. But then, lo and behold, a little angel called Evan fell from the sky, and we didn't question his fortuitous arrival, but merely presented him our plans for an address book import with the saddest faces we could muster and pleaded with him to save the poor little feature from months of neglect. He looked at us quizzically, laughed at our entreaties, and disappeared into a black development hole with our plans. Evan did some stuff with code, he bought a new monitor, and suspended his pretty Mac on stilts so we couldn't see his face. He typed. A lot. And missed numerous group lunches. He chose not to indulge in our 3pm giggle fests, and then one day he announced that the feature was complete and ready for testing. At that point, Nell, our trusty Director of Product Operations, kicked into high gear and tested the importer in every browser and for every email client imaginable until her head began to spin.
We almost lost it when it went live. Almost. We won't fill you in on the gory details, but suffice it to say that some of us needed more than one Diet Coke and a prayer to get through.
And, voila! There you have it, your beautiful, glossy, well-designed address book importer is now available. You can now see who you already know on myJambi and invite every person you have ever known in your life to join—so that when you need something or want to offer your services, you can literally spread the word to everyone with just a click.
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