Flaming Desks is a blog…

Social Innovation Camp. (It's a camp, where you innovate about social stuff.)

We’ve applied for this.  It’s a very nice concept actually; likeminded people hooking up to talk about interesting social things… sound familiar?!

Obviously, simply by reading this post, you have tacitly agreed to go and read our application, and then use the comments field at the bottom to leave a ringing endorsement for Flaming Desks to get picked for the camp on the 5th-7th of December.

(Also, if any of you brilliantly awesomely fantastic people from Social Innovation Camp are reading; we are free those dates, and we travel everywhere with big bags of chocolate and beer…)

I arrived to hot desk at the Nonsense offices today, for the first time with gifts.  The croissants will hopefully go part way to making up for my occasional loud phone calls.  Rob, who’s suffering under a strict diet before his wedding, missed out but maybe next time I’ll bring him a celery stick or something.

Nick tucks into gifted Croissant

Okay guys, below are the three themes that I’ve designed for the look and feel of Flaming Desks. Simply click on the thumbnails to enlarge!

They should be fairly self explanatory so I will try to keep my chat down to a minimum! With each one, I have followed the same order; starting with the homepage; then clicking through to the search function of ‘Find a desk’; followed by the search results. I think that this is sufficient enough to show the ideas clearly.

Theme 1
With a nice and simple interface, this design is about attention to detail. The homepage (Thumbnail 1) allows you to search for desks straight away meaning one less click from a user journey perspective (compared to the themes following - hence only two thumbnails for this theme!).

I would like to really work at crafting the assets of the page to reflect heat in an attempt to make the Flaming Desks logo itself look hot and bright. A nice little touch like this remains in context with the simplicity of the site design and will give it a real premium look.

Theme 2
Dave, this is the one we hope challenges the hell out of you, excites you, and doesn’t send you running! Is it possible to have the whole background of the browser as the interactive map itself??!

As you can see from my designs, the idea here is that the content of the site is over-layed on over the map. Users are able to select Find or List a desk and the relevant overlay unfolds above the map. Minimize them again and use the map to manually search out desks all over the world!

The nicest touch with this design (as I’m sure you’ll agree) is the hole cut out of the overlay when search results are displayed (Thumbnail 3). The idea here is that by selecting any of the located desks in the results list, and the map will zoom to the correct location of that specific desk, centering it tidily within the hole in the overlay… so Dave, you think this is doable?!

Theme 3
Still using the overlay idea, instead of the map as the background, using some really crisp imagery of nicely burned wood textures could look amazing! The photo I’ve used in these designs was taken by Alec Mills, an amateur photographer I found on Flickr. She has extremely kindly agreed to allow us to use her photo on the blog (and Dave, she will hopefully be providing a higher res version of this for you too). Even if we don’t use the image for the main site, it would be nice to use this in some way. Additionally, I am sure we will get some good photos from our desk burning exercise too, maybe the images could change?! Maybe that’s a conversation for another time!

The homepage (Thumbnail1) is as simple as can be; a nice self contained logo with buttons to ‘Find’ and ‘List’. On clicking one of the buttons, the self contained device then expands out from the center and everything happens within the white box.

This appears to be the biggest question people are asking us.  But, also its the one that that has prompted the most answers from commenters too.  So, I thought I’d try to get it all down to a nice succinct answer.

Partly because I think it’ll be a useful bit of copy once we’ve got a Beta up, and partly because Dave asked me to and I said I would!  Here we go:

Q.  Why would anyone lend a desk for free on flaming desks?

A1. To meet / be around good people.

Nonsense had been doing this for a while - offering desks to people that are good to have around.  (In fact, the offer I made to Dave from White October that sparked the whole idea was partially motivated by us needing to develop relationships with awesome developers.)  Simon from Human Zoo pointed out that people could even ask for work favours e.g. “10 min chat about our website”.

This is my Dad. You could benefit from his wisdom!

Flaming Desks will encourage this by allowing Desk Lenders to state the kind of people they’d like to meet, and later by selecting categories so searchers can filter desks that are right for them.

A2. To feel good about yourself.
Lending a desk is a nice thing to do.  And we all know that being nice feels, well, nice.  Marcus from Proximity argued that its also nice to the planet; cuts down on wasted resource… I like the idea that one day Flaming Desks may be being used to such a level that we can count its value in No. of skyscraper builds abandoned!

Unnecessary.

Flaming Desks will be nice and friendly, and free - so should fit in this whole area… nicely.

A3. For tea, biscuits and solid gold timepieces…
Account Planning genius Matt Tanter (who is looking for a job right now, so feel free to use the comments to state your agency’s interest!) reminded us of a thought we’d had a while ago; allow people to ask Desk Borrowers to bring something along to say thanks for the free desk.

FYI: tea; milk, no sugar.

We are DEFINITELY going to do this, if only so Nonsense can invite Charlie Gower again and stock up on Custard Creams.  (I imagine that in other establishments the ask will be higher; e.g. to use a corner of Donald’s desk in Trump Tower, bring a Rolex…)

P.S.  I’ve made an ‘FAQ’ category, so we can put all this type of stuff in there and find them easily later.

Fire Eagle from Yahoo’s Brickhouse was released today. Basically it keeps an individual’s location up-to-date, usually via their mobile device. We could use it to tie in to Flaming Desks so that we automatically search for desk locations near the user. Not so useful if you are accessing it from your laptop or desktop, but when we finish the mobile version (!) it could be handy.  Also a good way of getting it out there.

Possibly a better tie up would be with geographicly based social networks, some of which are conveniently listed on this fire eagle blog post.

Airbeds... pah! It's all about the desks...

http://airbedandbreakfast.com/

Except it’s airbeds / sofas that they’re renting out and they’re charging.  That said the interface is great - very much in the direction that we’re heading with the mapping.

Techcrunch said they set up with $20,000 of seed capital… I think we can beat that with our $0.00 slush fund!

Thanks for the comments we’ve had so far which have been without fail encouraging. Here’s a round up of the most common issues that you’ve raised, and our answers (if we have any) for them:

• What’s going to make people put their desks up? This is undoubtedly one of the big unknowns : this is only going to work if we’ve got enough giving people with desks. We don’t have a solid business argument for it either : let’s be honest, there’s not much of an upside to it, apart from the warm glowing feeling you get from helping someone out, and the chance to meet a new person. And I think that’s what we’ll be focussing on : the feel good factor; sharing because it’s nice thing to do; the sociable element. It’s going to be a challenge for us when we create the brand and set the tone on the site. It has to feel supportive, collaborative (we’ve started well in this respect), and people will need to feel as if they belong to a community with a shared ethos of giving, sharing and not expecting much back in return. [Rob, I've just rambled in a pretty illiterate fashion as you'd expect from a developer : you're a words man - can you say this any more succinctly?]So far the straw poll highlights this challenge : there are far fewer people saying they’d offer their desks than would want to use them. But there are people saying they’d offer desks, and I think we probably do need a lot more people who might use the service than there are desks, so perhaps this split is about right.
• I don’t want to share my office with an axe murderer Yup, as has been suggested by lots of you, one of the first things we’re putting in is a rating system : people who use the desks can rate the desks, people who share their desks can rate their users. Frequent users get great ratings and nice things said about them. Of course at the beginning that’s no help, so then it’s down to sensible precautions. We’ll probably have an information section on the site, setting these out, but they’ll say something like:
  • If you don’t know the person, make sure you speak on the phone before they come in
  • Ask for references if you want [ultimately the reviews of desk users will end up being references, perhaps we should put a 'happy to be contacted as a reference' flag in when they make a review?]
  • Don’t leave people you don’t know in the office on their own
  • Avoid giving people key codes to doors

  The only real security risk that sharing your desk introduces is the stranger in your office.  With most open offices these days, that stranger is going to be surrounded by trusted employees : it’s going to be very difficult for them to get up to any mischief and there are much easier ways of stealing stuff / murdering people than this.

  Open minded employees of larger firms are probably going to find it difficult to get it past the jobsworth facilities manager.  This is something we recognise and we really see this app being embraced by small business offices rather than big firms.  Of course if Google want to get on board, I’ll be the first one trying our their spare desks!

Marcus also pointed out that there might be an environmental angle to exploit.  I’m with you Marcus, it feels like there should be… I’m just not sure what it is yet!

As Robbie points out, I have been preaching the everlasting gospel of sharing desks to one or two select industry contacts! Only things is, we haven’t really done a post that deals with “What are we doing?” and “What do we want?” all in one place yet - so anyone rocking up here might end up a tad confused.

I thought I’d have a go at that now. (Should also give us something to link to from our “About” page too - which has been a bit sparse and unloved so far.)

OK, so what are we doing?

First of all “we” is two friendly companies - Nonsense and White October. Rob from Nonsense and Dave from White October had an idea in the pub, and quickly realised that a collaboration between the two companies could make it happen. This blog is the manifestation of that collaboration. All posts are written by Nonsense and White October people, who are taking on various roles in getting what has become known as “Flaming Desks” made. (Hence silly posts about burning a desk for marketing purposes, and tedious ones detailing functionality!)

The idea here is that we’ll be 100% transparent about what we’re doing, so anyone can come along and read the actual conversations we’re having as we develop the Flaming Desks idea. And of course those people can comment on what we’re doing, which will enhance the whole thing.

Yeah, but WHAT ARE WE DOING????

So we had an idea (and I described how here) that we loved, which goes a bit like this:

There are lots of people (particularly “media types”) who from time to time could do with a desk for a day in a city somewhere. There are lots of offices, small and large, with a spare desk sitting there empty. Flaming Desks sorts them both right out… you’ve got a spare desk; you list it. You need somewhere to sit; you find one on offer and request it.

This is Flaming Desks. The beauty of the idea is that everyone wins. People with desks get an opportunity to meet new and interesting people (basically a nice way to network) and people without desks get, well, a desk. We can see loads of the “uber-freelance” brigade using this service once its up and running.

And finally, what do we want?

Right now, the main thing we want from all you lovely visitors is feedback. Please comment away on any of the issues being discussed as much as you like. This could be anything from something simple like “it’ll never work you muppets”, to something more complicated that I personally wouldn’t understand - like “have you considered using the Jango framework for Python in a Redhat Linux environment?”.

There’s a place for all your comments, in all the different posts. We promise that we’ll respond to all the feedback we get. (Although don’t expect us to be polite if your feedback is mean and nasty!)

Specifically:

• Are there any existing communities / web apps that you could see it integrating well with?
• Spotted any obvious pitfalls?
• Do you have an old desk you want burnt?

Answers on a postcard. (If you actually want to send a postcard, send it to Nonsense London, Studio 4, 10/11 Archer Street, London, W1D 7AZ - we’ll put it on the blog.)

Yeah, but what do we REALLY want?

Two things you could do that would be invaluabe to us right now would be:

- vote in our straw poll.
- subscribe to the RSS feed, or bang in your email address in the little box in the top right the blog [Or this one... DF].

- forward the link around like crrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzzzyyy.

[UPDATE:] And another thing! Why are we doing this?

Simple. Because we think its one of those things that just needs to be made. OK, and because it might make a few people notice our two companies a bit. And because we’ll hopefully meet loads of useful clever people through the comments and collaboration. And not to make any money. Well maybe one day, but only from someone who promises not to bugger everything up. (Hmmm - not that simple then.)

Hey guys.  Good meeting yesterday.  Right I haven’t got long before some other people’s children arrive at my flat, so I’m just dumping these notes out:

Functionality

Now:

• Home page with large Mapstraction map showing locations of offices; prominent link to add a desk
• Page to register and upload your office and desk details (including multiple desks?)
• Preview details page
• Office details page
• Desk details pop-up / page
• Request this desk form
• Tell my friends about this desk (following account creation)

Not discussed, but needed now also:

• Confirmation email
• Login
• Forgotten password
• Account
  - Update password
  - Update email
• Edit my office and desk details (replication of register)

Later:

• Registration for people requesting desks
• Rating and reviews of desk owners / desk users
• Postcode / postal town search
• Filters on the map
• Tell everyone in my address book about my desk (automatically pulls in from Hotmail / Gmail etc)
• Blog ‘buttons’

Actions

• Wireframes x 3- Dave (soon as)
• Legals - Rob
• Dave to send Rob liability clauses from contract - Dave
• Update blog to show name - Dave
• Logo design - Nick
• Desk sourcing and burning - Nick
• anything I missed off?

Nonsense's spare desk as seen from my Macbook's little camera (without bothering to unplug the lead, hence the rubbish angle).

Last week, the Nonsense team had a bit of a chat about how Flaming Desks will work. So here’s a kind of braindump about that. I’m going to be very interested in Dave’s comments here, because we’ve kind of worked on the assumption that White October can make absolutely anything. Here goes:

Homepage.
We identified this as a pretty key feature (we’re available for web consultancy at pretty reasonable rates!). We figured as simple as possible would be good. So we’re talking a nice picture/video of a desk on fire (might as well) and a nice logo. Then two titles “Share a desk” and “Find a desk”, with an accompanying graphic for each action, plus a little description of each.

Registration.
Whichever option is chosen, people are taken to a v. short form where they create an account with a username and password. Unless of course they’ve done that before, in which case they skip this bit thanks to lovely cookies. Manual sign in in the top-right corner etc. Do we need one of those email confirmation dooberries where you click a link? Bit annoying, but necessary perhaps??

Share page.
This bit of the user experience needs to be as simple as possible. So, we were thinking its just a form to create a simple listing for the desk(s) - a bit like eBay, or a Facebook profile page (see “Desk Page” later). We chatted for a long time about what happens if one company wants to list multiple desks - i.e. do they create a page for each desk? Or does the desk page contain “number available”?

We went for the latter, because once you think about how the search process works, its much better - more complicated database info required, but that’ll be no problem - right Dave?

So, there’ll be a nice headline like “Share a desk, meet someone useful.” or something. (Copywriting in a later post.) Then the form should capture the following info:

- name of company listing desk(s). Simple text field.

- industry sector(s) the company is in. Tick a box or two.

- address of office building. Ideally with that thing where you punch in a postcode and its spits address options back at you, and you choose one.

- upload photo. This one’s obvious. Re-size, crop etc a bonus here.

- date(s) desk(s) available. We decided our best move here was to allow people to specify a minimum of a single day, and a maximum of a month. Going too fine grained on the times a desk is available would make the process harder to understand for the lender, and not add any real value to the loanee. And, the max limit is there so we don’t get loads of desks on the system that are no longer available - a reminder email when its near expiry should sort this out (more on that later).

- no. of desks available. As I said, trickiest issues are around this, but the best way is going to be to allow people to list a block of desks - simply by typing a numeric value into a little box. Then, if someone requests a desk on a certain day, the no. available decreases by one on that day (more in the database bit later).

- desk description. A nice box for a paragraph about the facilities being offered. For example, Nonsense might say “We’re a bunch of nice digital comms ideas people looking to meet anyone who is also nice. Especially people in relevant roles like User Experience design, or account planners, or web developers, or whatever. We’ve got a decent wi-fi connection, an infinite supply of caramel digestives and a tendency to talk too loud when we get excited about something. Headphones recommended!”

(In fact, all of this form would be pre-populated with example text in grey that disappears when people click in the boxes. Just to give people an idea.)

Now that I’m typing this one up, it strikes me we could split this into “Looking for…” and “Facilities…” and maybe something along the lines of “If you’re feeling generous please bring….”. What d’you think guys?

Listing emails.
This would be a series of messages each carrying out a specific purpose, related to a desk listing; like the re-list reminder mentioned earlier, one to confirm a listing, and the ones generated when people make a request. Will do a post specifically about these later.

Find page.
We need a nice and intuitive search device here. Hardly any copy. Users will need to specify;

- the date (or date-range?) they want the desk for. Nice calendar interface like Google Analytics or TfL’s site.

- the ideal location of the desk. Either by typing in a postcode, or perhaps sticking a pin in a map. Maybe both - i.e. they type in a postcode, get shown a map to confirm / move the pin. It has to be “ideal” location, so we can match the nearest results. Would they need to specify “within X miles of…”?

- industry sector. This one’s optional, but they can check a few boxes next to their preferred industries (e.g. Media, Finance, etc.)

Then they click a “find desks” button…

Results page.

This would be like Gumtree / eBay really. Results returned in short-format with:

- thumbnail photo

- user generated star rating. (Although little flames would be cooler, obviously.)

- intro to description copy

- date range desk available

- industry tags. i.e. small copy underneath entry.

- location. Dream scenario, a Gmap is returned, centered on the ideal location, with numbered pins all over it. Then each result has a no. next to it. Failing that, just the address with the result would be good.

By default, the list would be ordered by location. However, users should be able to re-order by the following criteria:

- star rating.

- industry. More of a filter than a re-order thing, maybe tick boxes at the top; “All industries”, “Finance” etc. This could even mean that people don’t have to specify at the point of search.

After playing around with this, and maybe re-running a search query, people can click on a result, taking them to a…

Desk page. (Which is actually a “company page” really.)
Contains all the info provided by the person listing the desk, plus:

- average flame rating.

- comments from previous users.

- a “Request this desk” button. This takes people to the following page.

Request form.
This page should build a request to submit to the person who listed the desk. It may only require them to confirm the request details are correct, and type a personal message to the person loaning the desk. Then a button to submit the request. This generates an email to the lister (emails post coming soon), containing a link to what we’re calling the “response page”.

Response page.
Simple page where person loaning desk does to click “yes” or “no” in response to a request. They can also type an accompanying message to the requested - e.g. “Look forward to meeting you. Jammie dodgers please.”

Feedback.
After the date of an accepted request has expired, loanees are emailed with a link to a feedback form, where they set a rating out of 5, and type a comment. This feedback is appended to the Desk page, and the rating average updated accordingly.

?? - should we allow people lending desks to comment on loanees? Would require some kind of profile page for each person, which could get complicated. Perhaps an opportunity to comment on the loanees feedback - i.e. on the Desk page - would be easier and better. So, someone might say of Nonsense “This guys played their music too loud” and we might write back “Unfortunately this philistine does not appreciate Busta Rhymes!”

A bit about the database.
We’re imagining a database that holds the following info about each company that lists a desk / desks:

- name, location

- days desk(s) available for

- no. of desks available on each day. Number to be automatically updated as requests are accepted.

Extras / 2nd stage.

- we’re guessing all the maps stuff will have to wait.

- a set of buttons for companies to put on their website / blog / social space that link to their Desk page. i.e. shot of desk on fire with “We got desks” - or a funnier way of saying that, anyway - on it.