Tired of the inadequacy of wire frames on MS excel and PowerPoint we finally resorted to hiring a freelance Vietnamese software developer to translate the web-pages in our mind into a HTML prototype. In retrospect dealing with our prototyper was one of the most hilarious parts of developing analyzeVietnam.
Like a lot of industrious and enterprising Vietnamese our prototyper and his wife ran a small IT shop in the night in addition to a regular salaried day job. The wife managed the finances of their side business and she dispatched her husband to collect the specifications during lunch and coffee breaks.
And again like most Vietnamese our prototyper spoke very little English. Uyen graciously agreed to serve as the interpreter. Needless to say a lot was lost in translation during our hurried sessions at Uyen’s office and the result was a prototype that was quite unreadable with typos and spelling mistakes.
We were bursting with ideas. We wanted Matrix movie style raining numbers with charts and a globe for the central banner and an eye-catching green yellow combination for our theme. Our prototyper tried his best to accommodate most of our creative surges but the result was unfortunately mediocre and not very pleasing to the eye.
As you can see the compact analyzeVietnam of today with its mellow blue and white theme is a far cry from the above description- something that we arrived at after several iterations carried out almost till the time of launch. But what the Vietnamese built for us was the first physical manifestation of a nebulous concept in 3 peoples’ minds. This simple HTML prototype served as the basis of the multi-faceted and user friendly analyzeVietnam of today.
No comments:
Post a Comment