Date
Dec 2020
Client
Internal Project
Role
Product Design
Mobile App
Quantum Cube
Did you know there is a community of about 200,000 teens and young adults that competitively solve Rubik's Cubes? The record is around 4 seconds, and getting good takes multiple hours a day of practice. Below we have a video of the previous world record holder.
A few years ago, my little brother got deep into the vortex of speedcubing. As his brother, I would often go and support him in competitions and events. I became enraptured with the tiny world that accompanied this hobby. It was like a mini “economy.” You had companies making different cubes to improve on speed, and different stores that competed for the loyalty of the cubers. At competitions, there was always an “elite” table, where all the biggest influencers, and world record holders sat together.
I saw this community as a great place to test out an entrepreneurial venture, as it was a small market that would be easy to win, but still diverse and global. After talking to my brother, we found that the best place to try making an impact would be the timers used by cubers to track their solves.
To get to the point where a Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 10 seconds or less takes hours and hours of repetition. With such a large time investment, cubers like to track thier progress as they practice, typically with a timer made specifically for the activity. All of the available timers were offline solutions, which meant that different histories were stored on different devices, and cubers were not able to have a unified image of improvement. Having built multiple cloud-based applications with my partner for our first consulting firm, we thought we could do this with relative ease, and it would be incredibly valuable to the community.
I had never tried an entrepreneurial venture before, and working for different clients I accumulated ideas, but never got the chance to test them. I saw a golden opportunity to get on the playing field, and test my ideas directly against the brutal tides of the market.
This was the process I took in designing and building the application.
To understand the needs of our potential users, I decided to make a survey and ask 42 cubers to fill it out at a competition. Some of the questions we asked were:
These are a few things we learned from the study:
I found 3 basic types of users that participate in competitions.
I decided that the “speed demon” was the most important person to design for, as these people tended to be influencers and record holders. Community lovers would probably follow the trends of the influencers, and the intellectuals would probably follow the trends of the record holders. Therefore, focusing design and marketing on the “speed demon” would yield the best adoption rates.
Teenager icons created by Freepik - Flaticon
Student icons created by monkik - Flaticon
I set the following goals for the design of the application:
The screen diagram below illustrates how I layed out the application.
I wanted onboarding to be personalized but efficient, so users would feel at home in our app right away. There were a few event types that were common across the community, so I created a screen where users could select which of the events they participated in. Once onboarding was complete, the app would have all their sessions already created for them when they started tracking their times. Of course, users had the ability to add and update their individual sessions later.
When it came to structuring the sessions, we needed to build for flexibility and data integrity. Cubers track their solve times across different events, which require different scrambles. They also use different solve methods, which require the same scramble. The timers in use by the community let users change scrambles mid-session, but I noticed that this polluted the data integrity. I thought users should have the option to create a session for any type of solve they would like and lock in the scramble type for that session.
In competitions, times are measured using stack mats, which start and stop the time based on touch. Most timers mirrored this mechanism, and we decided to do the same. This was the screen where users were going to be spending most of their time, so to make the experience a little more pleasant, we added a nice little animation.
We provided users with options for the different tools that may have been needed while solving, including:
Here is a preview of the animation when users hid their times.
Many timers on the market showed various statistics split across various modals, which are cluttered and difficult to navigate.To simplify how users measured their progress, and to remove distractions from the screen, I thought we should take all the statistics and place them on one screen, so that the user could shift from solving to evaluating progress without letting one mental context pollute the other. Three statistics (Personal Best, Current Average of 5, and Session Average) were evaluated more frequently, so I left those statistics on the desktop solve screen.
My preferred way of testing is using real-world observation. I give the user vague intentions, and watch the face for points of frustration or hesitation as they complete the task.
Before I talked to the users, I came up with a list of the daily actions that would happen while using the timer, with the intention of presenting these prompts while they used the prototype.
These are some of the prompts:
Through their attempts, I would be able to get clear direction on how to improve the design.
After first creating the design, I thought that my information architecture of sessions would account for what cubers needed. I discovered that not everyone wanted to save every solve. There were cases where logging times would pollute the data integrity of a session, such as when borrowing a cube from a friend, or experimenting with a different method.
To solve this we added a “freestyle” mode, where users could choose any scramble type, and all their history would be thrown away after they finished solving on it.
When we made the statistics screen, we knew which stats mattered to cubers, but we didn’t consider the order or frequency of how they would be checked. This didn’t matter too much on desktop, but on mobile, users had to scroll to see their stats, and people checked for averages much more frequently than they checked for records or history.
This was a simple fix, as we just rearranged the stat panels on mobile to match the general desired frequency of our users.
In competitive cubing, there are penalties for not completing the solve all the way, requiring an adjustment to the time.
Even in practice, cubers like to mark when they get these adjustments, to retain the integrity of their solves. So, we added buttons under the time after they finished the solve. However, we found that the adjustments were rare enough that people would accidentally tap them more often than they used them to denote an adjustment to their time.
This also applied to the discard button, which gave users the option to remove the time from their solve history. This was definitely a button that needed a layer of prevention from accidental taps.
The solution was to remove the adjustment buttons from the main screen under the time, and move them to a detail modal showing the information of the specific time.
I know this is a design case study, but I was also proud of the work we did in marketing the timer.
To generate hype within the community, and draw followers to our accounts, we made a product launch video that introduced these features to the community. We then sent that video out to all the emails we gathered from the research phase.
I knew from the survey that 39% of people at competitions were on discord, 41% were on Instagram, and 91% were on YouTube. The next network after the three was Twitter with 12%. This data gave me a strong conviction of where we should focus our social media efforts. When cubers on the community asked for a Reddit or Twitter, I knew it wouldn’t be a good use of our time.
The video successfully got people excited about our product, and I tried to drive that excitement into the social channels of the app. The idea was to create a community where people could share their anticipation of the product.
Once the timer was closer to completion, we took the timer to Nationals 2018 in Salt Lake City, Utah. I placed a lot of weight on this event, as many cubers would be there including the influencers and record holders. I prepared business cards with a simple value proposition, and placed it on every table, so everyone could check out what we were building, with a link to a small landing page with our launch video.
I then proceeded to go table to table, showing the timer to every competitor. I asked them if they would mind us recording their thoughts on the timer. The result was the following video.
One table at the competition was key. At the front left, a small group of “elite” cubers all sat together. These were the record holders and influencers of the community. Each of them had at least 50,000 followers, and the most popular person there had 300,000. If I could win that table, the rest would be easy.
Most people would have immediately gone for the influencer table, but these folks are used to people bugging them for autographs all the time. I tried to get the entire competition talking about the timer, before talking to the influencers, so they wouldn’t be discovering it, from the person trying to sell. Then, I started showing the timer at the table directly next to them. I invited some other people to start trying the timer, and was able to create a small crowd directly next to the influencers.
Eventually, they started wondering what was happening over there, and they joined the crowd as well. To my delight, the most popular influencer, JRCuber, asked us if he could put us in his vlog with 300,000 followers.
We managed to get the timer on the Instagram of the organization responsible for organizing competitions, and a number of other vlogs. I was able to get 1700 sign ups for the beta just from this single event.
When I talked to different people about my start up and said I was making a timer for speed solving Rubik's Cubes, most people gave me weird looks. Most people imagine a startup to be an attempt to “change the world.” But with the research I did, I knew that this community was passionate and devoted. We closed the beta test at about 830 people, and the timer currently has about 1.5 million solves. So, each user has, on average, solved a cube 1875 times using our app.
This reflected the conjecture I had when first creating this app, that this was a small community, but incredibly devoted and passionate to this hobby.
The app had an incredible amount of positive feedback. When I showed the timer to different people, they consistently liked how visually clean it was compared to the others on the market. They found the session selection system intuitive, and the statistics screen informative.
Most of the work on the project entailed building the features cubers were used to from the other timers, but with the simplicity our users appreciated in ours.
I am proud of this project, as it made a small number of people happy and excited with their hobby, and genuinely improved their experience.
