Last week we presented a review of the implementation of the Curl eyeDecide application to Jeffrey Hammond at Forrester.  I have posted the presentation here.

Presenting were Doug Mcrae and John Chisholm (Cheese) from Curl and Juhan Sonin from Involution Studios.

As a developer himself, I think Jeffery enjoyed hearing from the people who actually did the work.  I'm sure most of his days as an analyst are filled with discussion of trends and features rather actual design and coding techniques.

Curl eyeDecide was a team effort between Curl and Involution Studios, a top application UI design firm.  The complete team included Juhan from Involution and Doug and Cheese from Curl. It took 6 months from conception to press release that included 4 months of implementation.  That amounted to 30 work weeks and resulted in 20K lines of code.

The development cycle was collaborative and iterative and featured Curl's ability to code and deploy with a total of 50 distinct releases. The development started with connectivity to the data and the UI design was driven by the actual user experience of the testers at each release.

Some key learnings were that design and development should occur over the life of the project in an iterative cycle.  Additionally professional graphic and UI design matters and having Juhan involved in developing not only the looks but the user experience from the beginning was paramount.   Another important lesson is to clearly understand the data, its values and what people will want to do early in the process.

You can get the complete eyeDecide application in source form here.