Mallsyok : The Workflow

Posted byDavid Cheah Leave a comment on Mallsyok : The Workflow

Design done using Sketch

I have written about Mallsyok introduction in previous post.

In this post, I will be sharing our workflow of our team.

Update: Unfortunately, we have stopped building new features and maintaining Mallsyok app. But that will not stop me from sharing our experience out 😜

Series

Brainstorm

Source by Dylan Gillis

Mallsyok was one of the many ideas that we came out with each person. We then pooled all of those ideas together so we have discussion on each and everyone of them. It was one of the those exciting moments where we keep using our creativity and critical thinking skills of think of some crazy ideas. Finally we came down to only 5 ✋ideas.

Our favourite tool to do it : Google Sheet

Idea Validation

Source by Glenn Carstens-Peters

We decided to get some public feedbacks on the 5 ideas by creating an online survey form and sending them to friend, family and colleagues. Based on those feedbacks and study of technical complexity, Mallsyok was chosen.

Our favourite tools to do it : Survey Monkey and Google Form.

For Survey Monkey free account, you are only able to collect a certain amount of feedbacks. Due to that, we had to duplicate our form out in Google Form. Moral of the story, always do research of the free tools account of their drawbacks before start using them. Else you would be wasting time in the end.

We asked some of the respondents on how they solve the issue of getting lost in mall. Here are some of their replies:

Visit mall directory panel

Ask officer at information counter

Search in internet

Memorize hard the shop name and floor level 🤔

Give up when cannot locate outlet 😄

Business Writing

Source by Helloquence

Before we start commencing on build Mallsyok, we had to list down 🖋some aspects to be considered and taken care of.

Immediate and long-term objectives

  • What immediate effect on user when using your app?
  • What are the long term goals? Are you trying to create an ecosystem or to start a new consumer habit?

Background and market opportunity

  • Is there a need for this app?
  • Any existing apps that are similar? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Team organization

  • Who is doing what?

Income and Expenses

  • What are the items you will be spending on?
  • Planning to outsource some task? That’s an expenditure.

Features to be implemented

  • List out the features in order of how important each feature is it

Marketing strategy

  • Social Media? Collaboration? Free-gifts? Blog?

Our favourite tool to do it : Google doc

Wireframe

Wireframe is important to us as it not only helps us to visualise how the final app will look like, but also show us some of the important aspects such as:

  • Space distribution
  • Content prioritization
  • Available functions
  • Intended actions
  • Relationship between screens

Our favourite tool to do it : Balsamiq Mockups 3





Mockups are like skeletons to your app

Mockups

Mockups help to enrich our wireframes. This is the stage where we add colours, fonts, texts, images, logos and anything beautiful to help make the wireframes come to live.

Our favourite tool to do it : Sketch









Adding some paint work to the canvas

Marketing

I guess we struggled a lot in marketing. Having many trials and errors but it did not seem to boost our installs. We have tried Facebook with different settings to boost our post for reaching more targets. Our website was hosted in Heroku and because of this our cost was kept at relatively low. Just the cost of the domain name. We have a wordpress blog where we would populate it with posts of recommended malls and some shopping tips.

Our favourite tools to do it : Facebook, Heroku, WordPress

Team Collaboration

We took this opportunity to try out some of the cool tools in the market to enhance our team collaboration. One important aspects of collaboration is team communication. Slack enables us to organise and keep our discussion according to channels or topics. It can be integrated with third-party plugins (one of my favourites is to-do) to further improve our productivity. Other than that, we use Whatsapp for urgent discussion but most of the time for water-cooling purpose. For group meeting or video call purpose, we choose Skype.

To keep track of our progress and outcome of discussion, we resort to the old fashion way which is using Google Sheet.

As for code collaboration and bug tracker, we use Bitbucket because it offers private repositories for free but limited amount (Special thanks to a colleague of mine).

Our favourite tools to do it : Slack, Whatsapp, Skype, Google Sheet, Bitbucket

Inspiration from other startups

I dedicate this special portion of the post to extend our sincere thank you to 2 startups that have shared with us their knowledge and experience. I guess that is the beauty of the world of startups, where everyone is generous and excited to share anything, hoping people continue to build great things! So thank you and kudos to Rovo and FirstSmile 👏. Strongly recommend to checkout their awesome apps 👍

In the next post, I will dive into each of Mallsyok features and experience of building them 💪

Check me out :

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