Fyne Labs’ first product is a service that developers can use to automate their app builds for multi-platform projects.
Building cross-platform app binaries and sending them to internal users or testers is a time-consuming and frustrating experience involving a good deal of manual effort. This is a pain point all too familiar to the Fyne Labs team.
The basic premise for Geoffrey was to build binaries in a few clicks, eliminating busywork so that developers could free up their time and businesses would save money. This product was relatively low-effort but high-impact so it was a good place to start.
I facilitated workshops with the Fyne Labs team to both surface their domain-specific knowledge and give structure to our decisions. This exercise plotted multi-platform build processes linearly (x) against the effort involved (y), manually or using this product.
The value in using Geoffrey is in speed, so the platform selection experience needed to be demonstrably quick while balancing the needs of those developers also deploying to a specific sub-set of architectures. Here I grouped the choices by platform and then provided a shopping-basket style interface to confirm the specifics.
This could be shared with users to download directly or with a QR code on another device. Again the focus here is on speed & utility.
As a product, Geoffrey’s value is not immediately self-evident unless you are in the business of deploying cross-platform apps, so we focused on this most easily addressable persona, the under-pressure tech lead. I designed & deployed this site, wrote the copy, and provided the illustrations.
A more ambitious goal is to tackle the needs of businesses or individuals who lack the funding or desire to build a custom multi-platform app from scratch.
I facilitated workshops over a few days with the team to focus on what value could be delivered by an MVP. I felt it was particularly important to spend a good bit of time on this area because the scope of the opportunity is so broad and the team resources were limited. So my focus was on defining what could be shown to demonstrate value to investors.
We decided to create a low-fidelity clickthrough prototype which could be tested quickly for feedback. Key things we wanted to include here were: connecting the app to real data via an API with a no-code interface; applying styling quickly across the whole app; and the ability to instantly test on mutliple device types.
For use in marketing material and investment pitching.
Excerpts from the logo and brand identity created for the Fyne system.
