Introducing This or That

The 2018 Viget intern class is proud to unveil an exciting new decision-making platform: This or That. Powered by seltzer alone, 6 young professionals took an idea from the ether to the Internet in just eight weeks. Here’s how we did it.

Ideation

It began, as all good products do, with an idea. In a brainstorming session, we popped ideas onto a board of virtual sticky notes. We added 21 distinct ideas and not one of them was This or That.

As we came back for a second day of ideation, we distilled each idea to its warm gooey center. At the heart of several ideas was the concept of voting. We pivoted and began to flesh out what a voting platform might look like. Without realizing, we began referring to the idea as This or That.

With a flashy name in hand, we began defining the product’s features. The list grew long, but we kept our 8-week timeline in mind. We quickly defined a minimum viable product. Users would be able to create an account, create polls with images or text, vote on polls and save favorite polls for later. The catch? All voting would be anonymous.

Don’t worry, your best friend will never know you voted against her getting bangs.

Wireframes & User Testing

From ideation, we moved into wireframing. User Experience Design intern Vignesh created low-fidelity mockups of the product’s components, where they would be located, and how the user would interact with them.

At the same time, Visual Design intern Julia was hard at work defining the look, feel, voice, and tone of the product. She presented logos and color palettes, which were then incorporated into the wireframes in preparation for user testing.

User tests asked participants to interact with prototypes of key This or That features. Feedback helped refine microcopy and drove further design iterations.

Visual Design

Julia took the wireframes and began refining This or That’s visual design. Page elements became lighter and smaller, leaving space for user-generated content to shine. Geometric accents and icons were added to convey positioning within the site, expiration statuses and more.

Development

Ruby on Rails Developer intern Aatif began translating the defined user journey into data models. As the Front-End Developer intern, I built out front-end components with static content, pushed them up to GitHub and then Aatif roped in the database. Along the way, the Viget engineering team helped review code for quality, security and logic.

When the site was nearing completion, Data & Analytics intern Solomon implemented Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. These tools allow him to track user behavior across the site, providing insights for future improvements to the platform.

Quality Assurance (QA)

After three weeks of heads-down development, we took a step back and reviewed This or That as it stood. QA helped refine visual discrepancies and ensured that the product functions well across standard browsers.

Launch

Business Development intern Riley led the effort to prepare an engaging presentation that showed Vigets young and old a new, exciting way to make decisions. In its first two hours, This or That handled 750 votes and gained 28 new users.

This or That lives at this-or-that.co – and it’s time for you to start deciding! We are proud to share this platform with you and hope you’ll join the This or That community and add your two cents worth on questions like:

Should Julia invest in a new shirt or bold new earrings?

Is the earth flat or round?

Is a hot dog a sandwich? (of course not)

Happy voting!

About the Viget Internship

Each summer, Viget interns dive into a two-part, 10-week program aimed at preparing them for the big, bad, real world of digital creative work. The program combines individual mentorship and a collaborative group intern project to help interns grow into career-ready professionals. Recruitment for the internship program begins in January each year.