Posted by: tinylists on: September 1, 2010
As we work towards an initial beta version of our TinyLists Sign-Up, we have been hearing more and more about the problems with current digital/non-digital sign-up approaches. (You can read about some of these problems in our previous post.)
What we have also heard is how important good, simple sign-ups are for events and groups. If the sign-up is complicated and fails to include everyone who wants to join in and help, you run the risk of alienating those well-intentioned. If the sign-up reaches too far, with few controls or ways to organize the helpers, organizers may get inundated with an overload of help, or helpers trying to assist but getting frustrated they are being ignored or not being properly directed.
Add to that the maintenance needed to make sure those who signed up get the proper information, confirmations, reminders, updates, etc., and you may quickly find your volunteer organizer wanting to be reassigned.
We think sign-ups are important because they are inherently linked to and thrive on your social network. In order for a sign-up to be valuable to the organizer, the organizer needs to get others to use it. The more that sign-up, the more likely you will get the help you need. All of this has to happen within an informal approach, not a contract or commitment. But like those more formal transactions, you want to help nurture accountability and responsibility or else, you end up doing the work, or worse, nobody does. We want to make sure TinyLists provides a great core set of services that addresses these needs.
Posted by: tinylists on: August 27, 2010
With our new emphasis on solving one problem (organizing helpers via sign up forms), we have been talking to many moms, our initial target users.
It seems like there are three main ways moms go about getting other folks to help out in school, church, or other community events.
We know that in the workplace, there are a variety of enterprise solutions that help teams allocate responsibilities. These formal approaches fit a wide variety of situations, and the simple fact that everyone is working together (and getting paid to do so), keeps things humming. However, when there are a bunch of informal activities, and volunteers are squeaking time out of a busy schedule, getting the whole allocation of tasks done smoothly and correctly seems rather painful for many folks.
Paper signups are the simplest to get going, but suffer from a variety of issues. You need everyone physically present. After the initial sign-up, you can’t update without having to redistribute the sign-up form. Many times the organizer has to translate the written scribbles to another neater piece of paper, or transfer them to a digital version — a WORD document. Asking helpers to write their email address usually leads to mistakes keying them into an online mail list. Plus, all confirmation and reminders are most done manually, with volunteers trying their best.
Bypassing the paper version and going straight to email has many issues as well. Emails that are sent to a large group encouraging a subset to sign-up seems to be a sure-fire way to get into troublesome email practices. Emails tend to fly from one end to the next as some say, “Yes, I can” and others reply “No I can’t because [insert excuse here].” If those interested in helping exceeds the number of open tasks, the organizer runs the risk of alienating those who sent in a “Yes, please let me help!” but were too late.
Furthermore trying to weed out email addresses from those who did respond from those that didn’t is very difficult. As one mom told me, she prints out all the “Yes!” emails, and then with a red pen, crosses out email addresses from the master list to isolate those that did not respond. Sounds very tedious.
Finally, the online documents like google docs seem to be attractive but also suffer from some other issues, particularly setup is difficult. They also tend not to have a simple built-in way to let the organizer manage helpers.
We aim to find a way for TinyLists to make your life easier by helping you organize your helpers. Look for our first release in the next couple of weeks.
Posted by: tinylists on: August 21, 2010
So last week, we discovered another use case that was particularly compelling, and in some ways, a more simple version than our current TinyList approach. We had been developing a simple way to track progress for teams, and part of the process was having an organizer set up tasks. Helpers would then be able to sign up for these tasks, and we’d help the team track how things were going. After some conversations with our friends and family circle, we heard loud and clear that a simple sign-up process alone would be helpful. Very helpful it seems.
The challenge was pretty straightforward :
It ties in rather nicely to the whole TINY philosophy, and we think we are going to give it a try. For the time being we are focusing on this sign-up process and well then re-focus our efforts back on the original ‘progress approach’. We think the time-saving tools are a winner for our initial core users (moms, volunteer organizers, etc) and we look forward to getting your feedback.
Posted by: tinylists on: August 16, 2010
TINY philosophy: part III
The origins of TinyLists comes from our collaboration on another project. Both of us have many projects (work, home, school) that we are constantly trying to keep up to date on. Some are more complicated, others are pretty simple. All however require us to do some work, coordinate it with others, and do it by a certain date.
Dividing the work with friends or colleagues is the only way we can tackle most projects. Sure there are somethings we can do all by ourselves. Others however need to be done with other people because of their skills, resources, and schedules.
Deciding who does what and when sometimes is the easy part (your boss at work/home does this all the time). We also come across many projects when we need to sign up for work, deciding for ourselves for what we are best suited. If we have a party coming up, some of us may choose to help decorate while others love to be in the kitchen.
Sharing the workload lets everyone join to tackle projects that may be too big for one person to do by him or herself. We regularly divvy up tasks with spouses, close friends or colleagues. That may be the easiest part, however.
What we might end up with however, is a whole separate job of now managing everyone. That’s when emails start flying around. Inboxes get filled up. Emails get outdated by other email with more updates. New responses to outdated emails cause more confusion. The simple tasks have now become more difficult.
Yes, you got many people to help you organize your party, or help you canvas the neighborhood for a local charity. But the simplicity of the tasks and the good intentions of your supporters have both become overshadowed by the complexity of organizing everyone.
We built TinyLists exclusively around the idea of helping these type of simple, everyday collaborations go smoothly. We think if these simple projects are easily managed, you can free up energy to tackle the bigger projects in life.
Posted by: tinylists on: August 8, 2010
TINY philosophy: part II
Imagine calling up your parents and declaring, “Mom, that’s it. I am no longer going to do all the things you told me to do. From now on, I am all about me. I am ONLY going to do the things I need to do.” You probably won’t win any prizes for declaring yourself an openly committed selfish child.
In designing services however, being committed to being limited is the name of the game. In fact, the more limited you are (we believe), the greater the likelihood you will build a great product. Deciding what not to do is our obsession (imagine saying that to your mom).
A good example of how far we like to go with limiting ourselves is our early decision not to have any registration to use the product. Zero. Zip. Nada. Registering to use a service rarely benefits the user. If users didn’t need to register to get discounts, send party invitations, or see someone’s photos, I don’t think many would.
So you don’t need a registration to put together your TinyList. That way, anyone can set up a TinyList in under 30 seconds.
You will also see we didn’t require you to enter in your friends’ email addresses when assigning them tasks. Or re-entering dates for tasks due the same day as the overall project. We hope we kept it simple enough. If you see something we could eliminate or make simpler, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.
In our next post, we’ll talk about how we like to involve friends. We think getting friends in the mix makes things even easier.
Posted by: tinylists on: July 26, 2010
(Maybe we should call it a manifesto?)
Complicated things are all around us. We have to do hours of research to buy the right TV, We have to coordinate schedules months in advance when we want to organize class projects. A party that is supposed to be fun can become an event never to forget for all the wrong reasons.
We want to make things simple. We think the bigger a plan gets, the greater the chances it is going to get really complicated. And once it gets complicated, chances are things are going to get less fun.
So we want make things simple AND fun. The way we like to do this is to keep things TINY.
There are four basic elements to our TINY way of looking at things.
In our next posts, we’ll dive into each of these, and look at how we are building TinyLists with these points in mind.
