3 year 50 million installation: How do we design pea pods?

One

This February, we released the Pea pod Windows version 2.0. The design and development time of the project is 10 months long, which may not be long for many companies. But given the 10 months of nearly half the two-year history of the Pea Lab, Pea Pod 2.0 is important to us.

At the end of 2009, when we started the Pea lab, we wanted to do different companies and develop different products. With our products and technology, to help users solve problems. Instead of being like many peers, use other, more shortcut ways. We have done a lot of experiments in two years ' time. Some attempts have failed, and some have succeeded.

"Success" has a simple standard, that is "borrowed". 2010, we have just launched the first generation of products, with similar software in the past very different product design, especially the function greatly reduced. Some friends worry that our products are too succinct, and some people warn us that this kind of "highbrow" products are not going well in China. But today, we already have more than 50 million installed, and all of the more influential desktop phone management software that is on the market is basically not out of the frame defined by the pea pod. It can be said that we have redefined the desktop handset management software in the past two years time.

We don't mind being followed by others, because when others are still following us, we are actually ready for tomorrow.

This is the design background of pea Pod 2.0.

Two

Why do you have to do pea Pod 2.0? To answer this question, you need to know what kind of environment Pea Pod 1.0 is in.

Pea Pod 1.0 began developing in December 2009, when the most popular Android phone in the market was the HTC Hero,motorola Milestone just launched, Nexus one is still missing, and the number of Android phones in the country should be only in millions Don't. In this case, we focus our pea pods on Android, which is actually an adventure. To be honest, we don't know what the user needs really are.

Therefore, the most important task for Pea Labs is to quickly launch the smallest available prototypes (Minimum viable product, MVP) to validate user needs.

So here's a little bit of a detour--why are few startups going to choose Windows clients over the years? The reason is simple: the cost of development is too high. It's hard to be a very good Windows client, much harder than Web services, IOS, Android apps. That's why we now want to open up the framework of the WEB client we create, because it's so hard.

Therefore, it is understandable why pea pods were first chosen to be developed with the. NET Framework--we chose development efficiency as a matter of development efficiency or user experience. Although this decision was later criticized, we will certainly make the same choice even if we do it again-because it ensures that we can bring the product to market at the fastest speed and quickly understand the needs of the users. Quick Iterations.

So you can imagine, at that time our mentality is: as soon as possible with the building blocks to take a car to go, other say. Even if the car is not reliable, but at least can go. And when we can go, we should have time to make a good car again.

Flash a year has passed. February 2011, we ushered in a 1 millionth user. As we expected, the user needs change very quickly, a year's time inside the product has been a lot of changes, but the foundation is still the building blocks made of the car.

The building block car has been overwhelmed, there are too many new features, too many defects, not to be undone.

Three

We finally made up our mind to reinvent and develop pea pods. It was in 2011 of February. Throw away the framework of the. NET Framework and develop it again in C + +--we know it's a hard thing to do. But the reality is harder than we thought.

An ignorant person is fearless.

Our original plan was to release Pea Pod 2.0 in June 2011. However, by May, we estimate that the new product will be released in July, it can be more secure. By June, we are again expected to be released in September, so we can have a good national day holiday. But by September, the estimated point of time has turned into a New Year's Eve. The board Feng Fen promised to poison himself if it was not released before the New Year (fortunately no one had mentioned it later). Finally, we were released on February 22, 2012.

This day is not deliberately picked, but because the PEA Pod 2.0 indicators finally a week ago, the basic standards.

Looking back, we were free to use the building blocks of the car, incredibly in this full 10 months of time, the installation volume from 1 million into 25 million. It's a really amazing thing to have.

Anyway, it's finally published.

Four

In March 2011, we started the design of Pea Pod 2.0. Pea Pod 2.0 What's the problem?

There are many different ways to understand the needs of the traditional process. For example, direct user interviews, issue questionnaires, buy market research reports, or listen to what opinion leaders are saying.

Our way is to rely on intuition and experience.

There are two prerequisites, one is the pea pod has been operating for a year, we are confident that the user's understanding of the needs has been a certain accumulation; the second is actually at that time, it is not unclear the user needs, but the user's large demand for our original products and technical framework can not meet the problem. So the first thing we do is to sort out the mountains of what we want to do in our minds.

The second thing is that the vision of pea pods has gradually become clearer in more than a year's time. By putting this vision into mind mapping, we have a roadmap for a few years. Pea Pod 2.0 How to match this vision is a natural thing.

As with all kinds of brainstorming processes, the need to collect is an open process. There will be a variety of sounds, but need product designers to summarize and organize.

At the same time, engineers are also exploring early technical solutions. The early exploration process is like the one pictured above. You need to constantly diverge, and you need to keep rejecting less-reliable ideas, leaving behind the ones that are reliable and making the next phase of divergence. So repeatedly, you have made progress in this divergence and convergence process.