During lockdown, the conversations I found myself having with friends and family were about our recommendations - for films, television, music, books and podcasts. Often we'd leave the call forgetting what was suggested to watch, read or listen, and go back to scrolling through endless pages of Netflix.
Good Stuff puts an end to random ‘must read’ notes stored on mobiles, or going back through old WhatsApps to remember what friends said they were binging. The simple app makes it quick and easy to discover, share and store recommendations.
I started conducting interviews about the way people consume and share things they like. This gave me a clear understanding of the mental model people used when they think about recommendations. It was also a good litmus test for whether the idea was worth pursuing.
It was apparent from early user research that people weren’t just interested in adding things they liked doing at home - but they also wanted to add things like restaurants, bars and galleries.
Next, I used some low fidelity prototypes to test some of the riskiest assumptions I had around user behaviour in the project. I also did a few technical tests to see what open source data I could use to make adding recommendations much simpler.
After iterating on clickable prototypes multiple times I have moved into code and started to build a prototype that can be tested by users over a longer period of time.
The project is currently in a private beta and will be released to a wider audience in early 2022.
