A challenge for all you people out there!

As promised, this post will cover the intricacies of How to Plan a Bluepulse Scavenger Hunt. In tandem with the contest, we at Bluepulse would like to challenge everyone to top this story with one of their own! The following is a faithful representation of what transpired on the fateful Friday of July 25th, and we would love to hear YOUR stories and share it with everyone else, with your permission. So, US residents (sorry to everyone else!) sign up 5 or more of your friends onto Bluepulse, plan some crazy event and tell us all about it! A chance at a $250 Apple Gift Card AND a cool story to share - what more could you ask for? :)

How to plan a Bluepulse Scavenger Hunt:

Aim: To have fun and experience Bluepulse in action
Materials: 9 Bluepulsers with mobile phones and Bluepulse accounts
Method:

Thursday

• Create a group on Bluepulse and invite Bluepulsers to join it

Friday afternoon

• Receive a message from Ben in Bluepulse with information on our first meeting place

Friday evening:

• Arrive at the meeting place via various modes of transport (Christopher biked [from the Caltrain station]!!! in hilly SF!!! I am in awe.)
• Ben leaves with Pete and plans on messaging us on Bluepulse to tell us where to go next
• We turn the tables on Ben & Pete and tell them where to meet us
• Use the Urban Spoon on Veera's iPhone to decide on a dinner place
• Use the compass on Luke's watch to figure out which direction to walk (I have no idea why we weren't using the iPhone GPS function)
• Realize that the restaurant was three doors down from the bar we were originally at (we overshot without realizing)
• Order dinner by messaging Christopher with our choice of dish so he has the entire list on his phone and can rattle it off to the waitress

Monday morning:

• Do a post-mortem where Ben asks, "What was the most memorable thing that annoyed you?"
• Understand problems that users have, such as:
• Not being able to search for a private group
• Lost group invitations
• Confusion between group messages and status updates
• But also acknowledging the good parts!
• Having a threaded group conversation while out and about
• Updating statuses to reflect where people are
• Being able to go back and look at those messages later on (yay inside jokes!)

There you have it, the epic Friday night that Bluepulsers spent in the city. Now, it's your turn! Remember to share that cool story and begin your own adventure by signing up those 5 friends and getting a chance to win $250 to spend at Apple. More details on the contest here.

Best unboxing ever? [Must be hump-day]

Yes, I know I've been suckered in to a viral ad campaign, but you have to give cred where due. Here's the unboxing of the Samsung Omnia i900:



[via Unpluggd]

The Atmosphere [Interns dishing dirt]

Clarissa's at it again, telling it how it is as Bluepulse's first intern...

It's the 11am Monday meeting where everyone gathers for the weekly briefing. The first thing I notice is the jovial atmosphere - people joke before, during and after the meeting. Bluepulse IS dry wit. The next thing I realize is how international the team is - there are 6 Australians, 1 Peruvian (Rodrigo), 1 Indian (Veera), 1 Swedish (Tina), and I'm Singaporean (no, that is not in China).

Anyway, after we're done with the updates, Ben asks Lou to start writing a "Cool/Uncool/Normal" table on the whiteboard. Intriguing. It's a pretty good way of getting updates from people, whether on personal lives or on Bluepulse stuff. For the first week, things on the 'cool' side include me (yay), scavenger hunt (this I will elaborate on later), and one of the 'uncool' things was Diane's jury duty - she was most unfortunately spirited away by the Superior Court of California on my second day of work.

There are points during the day when the office is really really quiet. I was initially actually rather confused because I thought a startup should be really busy and bustling, but later I realized that everyone IMs in this office. GTalk is the order of the day. or MSN. or Adium. One of those. People still walk around and talk to one another, but this excerpt of a GTalk conversation between Bec and myself proves my point:

me: :p i have to say i find it vaguely amusing that we're sitting about 5m away from each other and IMing
Rebecca: hahah - now you know why it's always so quiet in the office
me: ohhhhhh O.o
Rebecca: and you'll also know why you'll suddenly hear 2 or 3 people around you all laugh at once :p
me: techy pple... sigh.

The truth of said prevalence of technology in Bluepulsers' lives is reinforced when we go off to SF on Friday for our scavenger hunt. More on that in the next post! Stay tuned:)

P.S. Special announcement: Pete's fish had a little fish! Okay, I just googled, it's called a fry. Please excuse my ignorance.
P.P.S. When asked what a baby fish was called, Luke suggested, "Fishy?"

Mobile is different from Mobile

Bluepulse has a UI that's pretty well optimized for mobile usage. Among the guidelines are (a) subject the user to as few links as absolutely necessary [to minimize navigating keystrokes], (b) make everything compact [to minimize scrolling], and (c) keep pages small [to accommodate devices with limited memory].

Bluepulse has a UI that's not very well optimized for mobile usage. Among the problems are (a) not enough links to take the user directly to where they want to go, (b) not making the links really big [to avoid the fat-finger problem], and (c) not taking advantage of large scrollable screens [to minimize pagination].

I'm talking about the differences between keypad-navigated devices (most everything today) and screentouch-navigated devices (e.g., iPhone), of course. And more generally, the diversity of devices that a mobile team that's fanatical about the user experience has to deal with.

Device-capabilities profiles will help ameliorate this. Rapid advances in the mobile browser experience will solve this.

But the larger point is that today, it's (unfortunately) still naive to think there is a "mobile user experience" expertise by years of experience, and even more so to think that the lessons end at a set of desktop-vs-mobile comparisons and contrasts.

We're moving fast and are breaking things along the way. Everyday the world presents itself anew. But we have our heads and hearts in the right places. We'll get better, we promise. Sorry, iPhone users, your fingers are not fat. Our buttons are too thin. We've got some growth hormones in the pipelines.