The first Kio Kit customers

Last year when we launched our ruggedised Kio Kit, what followed was a ton of interested buyers. It gave us both huge hope and nerves that our product was going to schools. Prior to launch, we had piloted the Kio Kit in some schools and that gave us a lot of user experience feedback. Now however, it was time to find buyers and ship them off to new users.  

Our first customers unexpectedly turned out to be students. International school of Kenya’s students huddled together and made the first purchase as a donation to a primary school in Nanyuki – Irura Primary School through their inter-cultural program. Irura Primary School is about 20Km from Nanyuki town and about 6Km from Ol Pejeta’s Rongai Gate. The students come from the nearby community, beyond being surrounded by an expansive wildlife conservancy, they are nested away in rural like settings.

Since our first Kio Kit deployment, we have learnt and improved many times over. From teacher training to content preparation, over time this experience gave us many learning lessons that we have certainly benefited from. Our first customers and school feel special to us, in a way we have only learnt what that means almost 1 year later.

Improvements to the Kio Kit.

Irura Primary being the first to deploy the Kio Kit has been a long process of learnt improvements. We began to learn key things such as how to better manage the content, to supporting hardware issues. There were hurdles that since then over 9 months has been significant to making improvements that are now applied on the Kio Kit.

Supporting Teachers

When we launched the Kio Kit we had some ideas of what impact it would have on both the students and the teachers, however our calculation was theoretical. We imagined it. It has been revolutionary to see how teachers benefit from using the Kio Kit. They have taught us how to make improvements, not just by making it easier for them to find content for their classes but also aiding them with lesson plans and giving them additional teaching tools to support them. Teachers love using the Kio Kit in class because it’s a helpful teaching tool. The students are able to focus better in class, they pay attention to what they are learning with ease and they don’t get distracted easily during their lesson.

Students

Schools like Irura that are away from cities and in rural towns are usually lacking in facilities and learning materials. Most students don’t have textbooks or enough of them and even finding writing materials is difficult. Without some form of technology, learning for these children would be difficult. The Kio Kit provides a great alternative to learning and beyond that gives the child a grasp of what technology looks like in this century. ISK also provides content which they share with Irura students. This content, created by ISK students helps their peers not just watch, but also understand what their peers have made in this cultural exchange.

Kids by Kids

Learning through peers is a great way to gain greater understanding of educational material. ISK students took this in an interesting approach. Their cultural exchange program got them interested in learning about the folk tales and traditional stores the students in Irura had learnt through generations. These stories were then translated, drawings and narration added to make small animations.  Today the content is available on the Kio Kit.

Many Thanks

Our trips to Irura Primary were coordinated with the help of Rift Valley Adventures. They played a big role in setting up a computer lab at Irura as well as hosting us many times when we would take the trip to Nanyuki. Endless thanks to Dipesh Pabari who didn’t tire in getting our team together with both ISK and Irura Primary.

A year on and full of hard work, looking back we learn a lot from our first deployment. These lessons and many more fuel incessant changes to move our product in the right direction.

BRCK has been known for developing products for the edge of the network and very remote regions of the world. Lately our products have been pushing even what we as BRCKers consider the edge.

One of our biggest themes is the “if it works in Africa, it can work anywhere.” And that was never more apparent to us than when we recently found ourselves on a very small outboard motor boat hopping from one Solomon Island to another. The size of craft did not warrant being in this ocean infamously called the ironbottom sound. “Ironbottom Sound” is the name given by Allied sailors to Savo Sound, the stretch of water at the southern end of The Slot between Guadalcanal, Savo Island, and Florida Island of the Solomon Islands, because of the dozens of ships and planes that sank there during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942-43.

We were on our way there because the Savo Island School in 2016 is also the new home for a Kio Kit. Our most remote school in Kenya has been in the Kalama Conservancy and in an interesting play on words, the school in Savo is named Kalaka school.

Upon safe passage through to the island,  we were greeted by an amazing group of teachers and students alike. Savo island is beautiful, volcanic hot springs and rivers, palm farming and with a population of approximately 2000 people, the Kalaka school offers Primary, Secondary and Vocational training.

With no electricity and connectivity, getting access to research and technology for education through the Kio Kit becomes a major boost to the community and the future.

As we did the teacher training, it was apparent that our visit to the areas our products are used informs us on how to make a world class product but also localized enough to bring value at the regional level. For example; Content is a major aspect of the Kio Kit and education in general. Part of our commitment in the Kio Kit is to help communities grow. That being said, the growing pains of one community can differ widely from another. The Kio Kits in Africa have very good content on issues like cholera and sanitation, while the South Pacific Islanders were asking for more information on tsunami preparedness and diabetes awareness. While in Kalama we build for dusty conditions, in Kalaka we have to consider humidity and sea salt. Galvanization is now a new discussion in our UX and engineering departments. Going local helps us address local issues.

On this trip we also did visit a 2nd grade classroom in Canberra ACT region Australia, the contrast in classroom technology a mere 3 hours away from Savo island is mind boggling. But it is because of this that we are putting our best foot forward, in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas and beyond. Together we can narrow the gap in digital education, research and libraries around the world.

As we move forward, we also would like to recognize the amazing partnerships that we have on the ground and in the region without which this new frontier for BRCK would not be possible.

At BRCK we are fanatical about User Experience (UX) and Quality Analysis (QA). That is why last week, we took the fantastic 5 to Kajiado to spend a day with one of our BRCKs in the wild.

Kajiado is a town located 80 kilometres south of Nairobi, along the Nairobi – Arusha highway (A104 road). Local people are predominantly of the Maasai tribe and we consider it the kind of place that we build for. Though located just south of Nairobi, Kajiado is a nevertheless a challenge get to.

Our trip began at 8am, a mistake because rain, traffic and the “scenic route” turned a 1 hour journey into a strenuous 3 hour ordeal. Luckily, we came prepared with a pair of land rovers, as the road conditions deteriorated continuously and we were soon off-roading in some of the prettiest landscapes in Kenya.

Our amazing host and BRCK owner met us at a gas station in Kajiado and we followed him to their beautiful home where we were welcomed with freshly made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, yum. Originally from Texas, our hosts say Kajiado is similar to their home in many ways. Landscapes, temperature, rainfall, or lack thereof, etc…

Getting down to business, we ran several tests, from understanding how they unboxed the BRCK and the way our instructions flowed, to testing connectivity, set up, the cloud management system, and even comparing other connectivity solutions to the BRCK. We do this is because, as a 2 year old company, we need to keep designing and building for the future. Any intelligence we can get makes us smarter. Most importantly, unlike many Modem and Router Hardware companies, we build for the fringes of connectivity and work our way in. For us to say we want to connect the 800 million unconnected in Africa, we need to stay situationally intelligent.

After several hours of work, we went back into Kajiado to a restaurant called Texas where we had some of the yummiest Bar-B-Q. Any objections of comparing Kajiado to Texas were put to rest.

Our research in Kajiado has been the talk of the BRCK office for several days now and with those conversations we move towards a better BRCK. The SuperBRCK. Stay tuned.

We’re receiving increased interest from Education focused organizations to use the BRCK to enable access to their content both online and offline.

One of the partners we’re working with is Studi Academy in Tanzania. Studi is passionate about changing how students in secondary schools in developing countries learn. They provide an online platform for students to engage with localized content adapted to local syllabus and language through educational animations & challenging quizzes, games to add fun and competitiveness and a structure that supports students to pass their critical exams.

Dar es Salaam city center

School “advertising” in Mbagala area, outside Dar es Salaam

One of the schools Studi is working with is St. Anthony’s school, a secondary school on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. They are using BRCKs to connect their computer labs to the internet, and more importantly to Studi’s content. The Head of Computer labs, is responsible for ensuring students can access Studi content easily.

We visited the school to see their experience first hand. Their BRCKs  have been working great though the mobile signal is intermittent. We ran some tests and  recommended that they get a unidirectional antenna as they have a cell-tower quite close to where the computer labs are located.

BRCKs connected to mobile internet from SIM cards

We also visited Acacia Secondary School, 30km from Dar es Salaam. Their school is 8km from the main road, sitting on a beautiful 55 acre piece of land. Before they receive BRCKs from Studi, it was important for us to run some tests to see what the best use case for their students  would be. For internet connectivity, we suggested that in addition to BRCKs, they should get an amplifier and an omnidirectional antenna. We also recommended that they cache content locally on the BRCK, as it has expandable storage capacity, giving the students a better experience than if they were trying to interact with the content online.

Acacia School buildings are 8km from this entrance

With many insights gained on how we can support our partners working in remote educational institutions, we continue to be excited about the potential to provide hardware and software tools to enable online and offline learning.

Are you running an educational institution or making education focused investments ? Talk to us – [email protected]

Farms and Ranch WiFi

I took off this weekend to test some BRCKs out in some of the more rural parts of Kenya. In this case, I was invited by Michael Nicholson who runs the cattle part of the El Karama Ranch situated near Nanyuki at the foot of Mount Kenya. The ranch is approximately 17,000 acres, and it has both a safari lodge and a lot of wildlife on it, as well as a 700-head cattle ranch. It’s an impressively well-run operation, and I got to see much of it.

The tower and gate at El Karama Ranch

It turns out that the ranch is about 13 kilometers from the nearest mobile phone tower, and with a normal phone sitting out at their gate, you can get some spotty edge connectivity. Fortunately, Michael is a tech-oriented type of rancher, so he was already familiar with modems and routers, and had educated himself on the types of antennas and WiFi repeaters he’d need. There was a lookout tower at the gate that already had two of Poynting’s amazing long-range directional antennas (which we call “swords” as they look like a weapon from a fantasy game).

He had a working setup, but his biggest problem was the modem would randomly shut off. This isn’t a problem on the BRCK, because as soon as the modem loses connectivity, we tell it to search again and reset and reconnect. A simple solution would be for Michael to replace his current Safaricom modem with the BRCK (see below).

Switching out a Safaricom modem with a BRCK

Heading into the Bush

The next day I took off up further north, past Isiolo to the Samburu area around Archer’s Post. This is a dusty, dry and hot land fed by the Ewaso Nyiro River. The wildlife research teams at the Grevy Zebra Trust and the Ewaso Lions had asked if we could test out if they could get connectivity.

This elephant isn’t friendly, he took off after us for a bit

Grevy Zebra – endangered

It turns out that to get to their camps you have to drive through the Samburu National Wildlife Reserve, which is amazing and has plenty of animals of all sorts. We saw everything from crocs and elephant to Grevy zebra and oryx. As fun as that was, it took us 1.5 hours to get through the park and many kilometers beyond to get to their camps. These teams are in real bush country with no towers anywhere around them.

Me, standing at that ONE tree where you can get network signal

However, like almost anywhere you go in Kenya, there’s always some random tree that you can stand under and get connectivity (that’s me at said tree, above). They knew where these were, so we started to visit the locations to see what might work. Of the 5 areas we tested, one had a strong signal but was a couple kilometers from the camp. Another had a weak and usable signal near camp, and one had a possible signal in the middle of the Ewaso Lions camp. Very positive, and doable!

In the testing kit, I take a couple directional antennas as well as a small omnidirectional antenna to walk around with. On top of this, I have a way to mount an amplifier (booster) in the car to increase the signal gain on the antennas. It’s a great bit of testing kit, and it proved out incredibly well.

My suggestion to them is that they’ll need to raise a small pole on the top of their hill. Add a Poynting antenna, Voltaic solar panels for power, a BRCK and an amplifier. If they do this, we’ll likely test out our BRCK Extender at this location as well, which increases the WiFi range from about a 10m radius to approximately 900m. Since both the Extender and the amplifier need external power, there will need to be a small battery which is charged via solar. This whole concoction will run just over $1000 and should be fairly hands-free once setup.

BRCK and Poynting antenna

Andrew helping with antenna holding

Using an Android app with the BRCK to test signal in the vehicle

Summary

It turns out that BRCKs end up being a great solution for some of these rural and off-grid type places. While we can’t drive everywhere to do testing for everyone, we do try to get out and see what’s going on and see if we can help. It gives us a better understanding of our customers knowledge, and also a better feel for their pain points.

Thanks goodness for BRCK. 

Unfortunately this will be my last expedition post this trip. I’ve had to leave the guys early to make a dash north to sort out some business. If it weren’t for BRCK I’d still be in Livingstone. When the news came that I had to come back to Nairobi, we knew we had 40 minutes to get flights. The BRCK was fired up, with in a minute we were online, and 4 of us rapidly trying to find the fasted route north. Its times like this that the utility of BRCK really shines!

Earlier in the day the BRCK became a lifesaver as well. On the road from Lusaka to Livingstone, a short 563km journey, the Land Rover developed a nasty fuel system problem with the fuel lines filling with air every 20km or so, stalling the truck mid drive. Stopping every 20km to bleed the fuel system makes for a LONG trip (14 hours I believe!). Out came the BRCK, and everyone who wasn’t driving was delving into Land Rover forums the world over trying to work out what the problem was, then trying twitter, facebook and instagram asking for help. Eventually diagnosing the problem as a faulty lift pump. Another quick Google search for a replacement lift pump in Livingstone and we were on the way again.

Trying to get help with a buggered 300TDi fuel system

Power issues again. 

We are an expedition company, and as such, our vehicles are kitted out more than most. We’ve got a 1500W 110V inverter wired in to the battery, 4 x 5A Cigarette jacks, and dual 12V batteries powering all the kit we have on the road. The biggest problem? Finding cables! Every time we have to charge a GoPro, power the Satellite internet or charge the motorbike headset, a mad scramble ensues trying to find the adapter, cable, or correct power BRCK. This is why we love the microUSB. As from Part I, we know its not perfect, but now we are torn. What should we use!

Knowing your limits

Getting the BRCK online in Tanzania and Zambia has been really easy, in fact, other than getting SIM’s and working out the crazy commands, the BRCK’s have been working flawlessly. One area that has popped up constantly is ‘how good is my signal now’. Driving from village to village the signal fluctuates quite a bit. We are working now to streamline the process of finding out how your BRCK is doing now.

Back in Nairobi we are working feverishly to take what the team and I have learnt to get some updates ready for the trip north on Saturday.

Working on new wireframes with information from the expedition south

(Republished from Erik’s blog)

Two days from now we begin a BRCK overland expedition to South Africa. Like any of our trips, it is meant to be fun and adventurous, while at the same time giving us the opportunity to stress test our product beyond the norm.

In the vein of our past expeditions to Turkana and the Nile, this one is on the edge. We’re taking 3 motorcycles and a Land Rover from Nairobi to Johannesburg in time for Maker Faire Africa on Dec 3-6.

As usual, we’ll have a couple guests, or “shotgun riders” as we call them:

On the way south: Juliana Rotich (Ushahidi, iHub, BRCK), and Mark Kamau (UX Lab lead at iHub).

On the way north: Aaron Marshall (CEO, founder of Over, Africa’s biggest selling IOS app), as well as Matt Schoenholz (head of the Kitchen Studio at Teague which focuses on prototyping and making).

You can keep up with us:

• On the BRCK blog (here), Twitter and Instagram
• On the WhiteAfrican blog, Twitter and Instagram

A Dash South

If you do the math, you’ll realize this is more of a mad dash south in time for the event, covering 4,400km in 9 days. Here’s what the route south looks like, from Kenya through Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana and into South Africa.

Nairobi to South Africa – southern leg

The journey north takes us through Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and back to Kenya, which we’ll take a little slower.

The People We’ll See & Events We’re At

We do have plans for a day off along the way. We’ll be stopping to visit our friends in the Zambian tech community in Lusaka. The Bongohive has been kind enough to host us, and we’ll be hanging out there, doing BRCK demos for techies and businesses, and I’ll give the keynote that evening for the beginning of Lusaka’s Startup Weekend.

Since I’m a founding organizer for Maker Faire Africa, I’m excited to go back, and this time have a product of our own to show for it. Besides demoing the BRCK and sharing how to build a hardware business in Africa, we’re also going to have some fun hacking on the devices with whoever is around and wants to play with them. We’ll have a couple of our engineers on hand as well.

Gearbox, our new prototyping and making initiative in Kenya, is a supporter of this year’s MFA too, so I’ll be able to speak to that and will have one of the Gearbox team with us at the event.

On the way back North we’re stopping in Harare, Zimbabwe to meet up with the tech community there. We’ll largely spend our time around the Hypercube, though plans are underway to get together with members of multiple tech spaces.

Testing BRCKs and Electronics

There are a couple new things we’re testing on this trip, three of which I’m extremely excited about:

When you add a RaspberryPi, a hard drive and another 8 hours of battery to a BRCK, you get a BRCKpi Microserver

1. BRCKpi – this is our RaspberryPi + BRCK device – it’s an add-on to the BRCK (we call those MRTR, as in “bricks and mortar”). We launched it last month with Mozilla in London, and are targeting it primarily at schools and clinics in Africa. However, we know there are a lot of other use cases for it, and one of those will be as a media server for our images and video on this trip.

Real off-grid, portable internet in Africa.

1. Satcoms – we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can extend the BRCK beyond the edges of the network, so that it’s the one internet device that’s smart enough to pick the right connectivity type depending on what it can sniff around it. To that end, we’ve been having great conversations with Inmarsat and we’re testing out their newest product, the iSavi (not even on the market yet, first one in Africa). Internet speeds are comparable to cellular networks at up to 384 Kbps down, and 240 Kbps up. It’s much smaller and more portable than a BGAN, so we’re excited to pair it up with the BRCK, stress test it and see how it goes off-grid.

Some of the best antennas on the market, made in Africa

1. Antennas – We’ve tested some of Poynting’s antennas before, and they’re some of the best we’ve ever found. This time around we’re testing their mobile units, paired with amplifiers which we built into the vehicle, in order to see if we can create quick, deployable units at the edge of the grid. Of course, Poynting is a South African company too, and as one of our partners, we’re going looking forward to seeing them in-person for the first time in Johannesburg.

I’ve been a bit remiss in my updates to everyone about what’s going on within the BRCK house. In short, we’ve been sleeping few hours as we try to do a whole load of updates, fix bugs, add new features, and create an overall better experience. I asked Jeff, Wesley, Reg and Emmanuel to put together a list of the recent changes, which you can see below.

Design

• Push out new version of the quick start guide for better UX
• New shop design (Improved UI/UX)
• New expedition BRCK symbol

Front-End

• Adding admin UI features to help the BRCK support team
• Improving UX by tweaking the UI based on user feedback for both the Cloud and the Local dash
• Fixing UI bug issues on the Cloud and Local dash
• Cleaning up the blog design

Cloud and BRCK OS

• Improvements on the Cloud to BRCK communications. This relieves some load from the BRCK when it receives communications from the Cloud. This mainly affects the changing of Preference settings. This is more of an efficiency fix that a bug fix.
• Fixed a bug on the BRCK that caused the local dashboard not to appear.
• Improved the reliability of the WiFi connection between your computer and the BRCK especially when trying to configure a connection for the BRCK via WiFi Bridging. At the moment the BRCK will sometimes drops the WiFi connection. This fix reduces that frequency and the chances of this happening. There are still a few more improvements to be done here, but this step improves from the current experience.
• Added a more reliable BRCK software update feature. This will allow the BRCK to automatically update critical software. It generally also improves the update process from our current process. There are a few more additions to be done such as exposing this via the Cloud to allow a user to install custom software packages.
• The chart visuals have been revamped and you can now filter the upload/download stats by connection. In coming weeks, we’ll roll out the deep dive analytic pages. These will enable you to have wider view of your BRCK’s activity; battery, network stats etc
• The BRCK API is out and in beta! It goes without saying that you must have a BRCK to access and use the API. If you don’t have one, visit https://brck.com/shop and we’ll be happy to take care of that problem for you.  
• What can you do with the API? In it’s current state, you can query a BRCK’s basic info and it’s status data. If you so which, you can use the latter to build your very own BRCK dashboard. For early access, email us at support(at)brck(dot)com
• What’s in the offing? A notifications system that will enable you to receive an alert when “X” takes place.
• While we’ve been working on the core software a lot, the GPIO expansion slot code is not quite ready, we’re very close to having it working, but it’s not there yet.

Hardware

The new 3d printed GPIO case prototype for BRCK

• We’ve made a revision on the primary board to ensure more stability. Currently being tested.
• A software patch to solve the issues with accessing the local dashboard. We’re testing it now, and our workaround is a small USB drive in the USB slot to fix the reliability of the onboard storage, that was preventing the offline configuration tool loading. Currently being tested.
• We’ve tested out a number of solar panels options, amplifiers and antennas. The best of which will go up on our shop for sale.
• We’ve been working hard with our plastics suppliers to clean up small issues on the rubber parts. The change of material will allow for even better robustness in the field without marking as much as the original Santoprene parts.
• A revision on the GPIO expansion board has been completed. Currently in testing.
• With the build rates going up, we’ve also had to invest heavily in automated testing. BRCKs now self test in the factory without as much human interaction.

As you can imagine, there are quite a few things we’ve been working on, beyond even the items listed here. Many bug fixes on all fronts, testing and modifications, and of course business-side work around the shop or partnerships. We’ll have some really fun news to share around the MRTR (hardware expansions) in the next couple weeks. Standby for more!

Designing for BRCK

Designing for the BRCK involves more than most tech design processes coming from the African startup space, since we have to deal with hardware as well as software.

Many designers get the opportunity to work on software (UI) and print at some point in their lives but very few get to touch hardware. BRCK is a merger of both and that’s what makes it the ideal testing ground for a designer willing to go the extra mile.

Having been a designer for over 12 years, I have worked on graphic design projects, print work and web design (UI), but never got the opportunity to be part of a team that builds hardware.

The challenges  one faces are tougher because one has to think of the product from a holistic view and not just one angle eg : A UI designer’s focus is only on a users screen and not print.

The BRCK is made up of :

• Hardware (The physical BRCK),
• Software (Firmware / OS that sit on the hardware and the cloud used to manage the BRCK remotely via the internet)
• Print  (Packaging box and User guide material.)

All this has to merge seamlessly so as to ensure the end user gets a product that’s easy to use right out of the box.

User Learning Curve

All products have a learning curve when it comes to user interaction. Some products tend to have a steeper curve than others if :

• The product is new in the market or
• If the product is a reinvention of what already exists.

Some physical products that already exist and have a predefined way of user interaction, it’s much simpler building a new product on that mindset.

The BRCK falls into the reinvented bracket. WiFi routers were there before, but what our team behind BRCK is out to do is build a product that solves the problem of Internet connection in emerging markets using a solution that’s tailored for those environments.  This means unreliable power, power surges, and a failover from “normal” ethernet internet into wireless 3G.

By so doing we had to look at the typical pain points people face while trying to get online then design and build a product tailored to those needs. We had to do away with the typical stereotypes of what a router looked like and how they worked thus creating a product that would be:

• Mobile – For when you’re mobile
• Versatile – Made to work where others won’t
• Powered (Rechargeable battery) – Thinking through power as much as connectivity
• Extendable – A platform to build on with software or hardware
• Cloud Managed – Manage your BRCK from anywhere

The BRCK was a product that was designed and functioned totally differently from other WiFi routers so we had to communicate well in order to minimize the learning curve and frustration of having to set one up.

The Unboxing process

Let’s jump 12 months from when we started this process, almost all the work is done and the first batch of the BRCKs have be shipped. Our team has put a lot of attention in designing and building a product we believe will deliver great experience.  However, like all other products there are things you will learn once someone else (a customer) interacts with your product for the first time.

Having interacted with the product for months over, we had our design thoughts set out based on our understanding on how users would interact with what we had built. That said we weren’t too naive to think we wouldn’t  have to make some minor changes based on the feedback we got after running a few internal UX (User Experience) sessions.

What we got to learn was that we shouldn’t assume some steps are obvious. Some of our design thoughts did contrast with what we saw. BRCK is a merger of hardware and software, with the process of how to setup being explained on a single A4 sheet of paper (The Quick Start Guide – the document in the packaging that explains the steps you take to setup your BRCK for the first time ).  The BRCK did work great but our communication on how to get the BRCK working on the “quick start guide” had to be thought through again.

This forced us to go back to the drawing board and solve some communication pain points that hindered users in getting their BRCKs up and running in minimal time.  Our focus now was to give more detail on the quick start guide at the same time to try make sure we do not clutter the page with extra information.

What we Learnt and changed

After opening the packaging most people grabbed the BRCK, picked the quick start guide and quickly browsed through it without reading the content. It was only after they couldn’t figure out what to do that they jumped on to the quick start guide.

Some of the core lessons we got to learn from the users were:

• They weren’t sure which side of the MICRO-USB CABLE went where.
• When the BRCK was charging most thought it was ON.
• How long does it take to view a WiFi connection.

After getting this feedback our goal became to try minimize the setup process time. From when a user unboxed their BRCK to when they were fulling registered at an average of 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

What did we have to do so as to achieve this? We had to reduce the steps and better explain each in better detail. This doesn’t mean we had to add text.  They say an image is worth a thousand works. We set out to use imagery to better explain the steps one would take to setup their BRCK.

We replaced certain graphics and added some in order to achieve this. Below are examples of some of the changes we made.

Old and New visual of the first setup steps

The Status light was confusing to users when they first plugged in their BRCK.
So we added a graphic to explain this better

We then set out to remove the setting of the WiFi from the registration process so as to reduce the steps.

Finally our greatest challenge was how do we communicate what the status light colour codes meant. The top light of the BRCK is the main physical communication point between the hardware and the user. This is done using different colors spinning and pulsing. The Quick start guide was printed in grey scale and we needed a way of conveying this information to our user without using text.  We then came up with the colour code charts.

This are business sized cards that visually illustrate what each colour is and does.

Below are the full versions of both.

BEFORE

View More : Download

AFTER

View More : Download