After a short and sleepless holiday weekend, I reveal Jabberpop. If you don’t already know about this project, well then here you go. Jabberpop is a personal project that I did this past Labor Day weekend. My goal was to see if I could develop a site/application in less than 72 hours and still keep my sanity - one of those I did manage to do. My mission was simple and my time was short. I was not intending to come up with a groundbreaking idea, but rather challenge myself as a designer and a developer.
What is Jabberpop?
Jabberpop is simple! It’s a site that allows users to submit their opinions to see if others agree.
What you see at jabberpop.com is a result of me barricading myself in my basement for three days. I must warn you, parts of the site may be a little buggy. For the most part, things do work.
What I learned
One of the biggest things I took away from this experience is that I pay a lot of attention to detail, maybe too much at times. The project got off to a slow start as I could not stop tinkering with design elements. I must have spent at least an hour deciding on a logo design and then about three for the overall look and feel of the site. At first I envisioned a bunch of cool features and later realized that they were essentially add-ons and were not needed to make the site work. I’ve realized that I sometimes jump ahead of the core idea and start planning new and exciting ideas before the others are done, debugged, and working. I’ve realized that the best way to program (for me) is on a linear progression, unlike my design habits which tend to involve working on multiple designs at any given time. This exercise was a great opportunity to flex my left brain and give my right brain a rest.
It was an awesome experience and I recommend for everyone to try it - at least once!
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7 Comments
On Thursday, September 6, 2007 at 7:36:am
Awesome Work! I am pretty impressed with the three-day-turnaround. I think this could be the start of a new era of super-star that can design, develop and deploy their own ideas faster than most executives can put a team of 5 together to try and attempt to do all of those things over 3 months (as opposed to 3 days).
On Thursday, September 6, 2007 at 4:47:pm
simply brilliant! For just 3 days this is an impressive outcome. Just curious, are you planning on continuing this site and developing it or is just a quick project?
On Thursday, September 6, 2007 at 8:34:pm
A little diggesk dare i say it!
Still it’s pretty cool in terms of coding, designing etc let alone in such a time limit.
I hate the fact i have to login to agree though.
Keep up the good work and nice blog design here too.
ps. i think the agree button looks a little empty, maybe a big thumbs up icon i dunno.
On Friday, September 7, 2007 at 1:08:am
Hey, thanks for your comments guys!
@Martin: One benefit of rapid development cycles is that they bring ideas to the canvas much faster without high risk. This project only cost me three days and leaving it behind is not a huge loss.
I believe in the Bob Ross method of creation. Executing rapid ideas one after another until all of the ideas layered upon each other create a picture. The one thing that always amazed me about Bob Ross was that he never made mistakes, nor did he ever change his mind halfway through a painting about where a tree was going to live. One last thing about Bob - most artists spend months painting a single painting. Bob could paint a masterpiece in thirty minutes.
@Bassam: This was more of an exercise if anything. If I come across reasons to continue development I will then do so. I have to admit though, I’ve had some feedback from colleagues and friends that have inspired me to make some changes.
@Zain: It’s interesting you mention a thumbs up. When I initially sketched up the design for this project last Saturday morning I planned on developing a disagree function. That was one of the many features that I cut in order to get this wrapped up within my three day hibernation period. And yeah, could be seen as a Digg for opinions.
On Friday, September 7, 2007 at 4:02:pm
i’m glad you unwrapped it! impressive!!
On Saturday, September 8, 2007 at 1:43:am
Glad to see you did it!
On Thursday, October 4, 2007 at 11:22:pm
what a really clever site idea..
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