Thingealogy

Why Thingealogy?

Entrusted by her aging parents as one of the executors of their estate, Kathy immersed herself in the task, captivated by the stories behind each heirloom, many of which were new to her. Among them, a Brazilian bedside table, a relic from her parents' early marriage, sparked her imagination. Unable to find an app to record and share these tales, Kathy conceived Thingealogy, a platform merging "thing" and "genealogy" to preserve the narratives behind cherished possessions.

Advice for new startup founders.

We asked Kathy what advice she would offer to new startup founders or those who are in the early stages of starting a company. Kathy said “find a good team to help you. I’ve been working with Josh Tucker and Keith Shields, the founders of Designli, since 2014 when we started the first version of Thingealogy.

Choosing the right partner.

The Designli team’s work ethic, transparency, and knowledge of the coding world is the main reason Thingealogy is such an easy-to-use and secure system. Another piece of advice is that it takes time to develop a product, so while you’re putting in all those long hours make sure to enjoy the process.

Read Kathy’s Interview

Step into the SolutionLab.

Designli's proprietary roadmapping session - focused on building out a plan (with price-points and timelines) for bringing Kathy’s skinny 'Version 1' system to a fully-featured platform ready for scale.

Building a new version without alienating V1 users.

During our initial conversations, we worked with Kathy to ensure that re-designing and re-launching a new version of Thingealogy would not lead to any downtime for existing users that had already stored valuable information and data into their Thingealogy apps. This migration, and ensuring those users were ‘onboarded’ and explained the new functionality in a streamlined way, was a vital component to our rollout.

Mapping out the user experience (UX).

Kathy brought a fantastic idea to the table: people cataloging belongings for estate or insurance purposes are already used to a ‘spreadsheet format’ to store this data. Could we build something similar as an interactive web-app? Our SolutionLab consulting engagement focused on defining how a spreadsheet-type UX could work in a way that wasn’t bloated or cumbersome.

UX/UI Design & Prototype.

Where ideas and a product plan truly come to life. Our talented UX and UI team prepared a stunning User Interface for Thingealogy, showing how a user could toggle between a ‘grid view’ versus ‘spreadsheet view’ to best visualize their stored information in a way that makes the most sense to them. This design was made into a clickable, navigable prototype so that we could ensure everyone was on the same page prior to development

Development, launch & iteration.

Thingealogy was developed with AngularJS, NodeJS and Loopback. During Development, Kathy was kept apprised of progress and “estimated versus spent time” for each task to ensure the budget was kept in check via a weekly update. After a brief Beta Testing period, Thingealogy was launched to the public - and the Designli team continues to stay involved for ongoing feature iteration as Thingealogy gains traction.

Technologies used: