During the Corona crisis, a Facebook group of parents in Australia started putting up teddy bears in windows so that kids that couldn’t go to school or play with their friends instead could go on a local teddy bear hunt. This soon spread to other Facebook groups and media started to notice. When I read about this, I figured that locating the bears based on a description in a Facebook group was difficult. Instead I came up with the idea to create a website with a map on which people can put their bears so the kids just could look at a map on their phone of their closest surroundings and find the bears hiding there.
You can visit the teddybearhunt.one site here [External site. Opens in a separate window].
Lean Start Up
Purpose: To figure out if anyone was interested of my solution
Method: To get something up and running as quickly and with as little effort as possible. In my case, I used a regular WordPress theme and a off the shelf map solution compatible with WordPress. The page was mainly marketed through posts seen by friends on Facebook as well as in two global Slack channels.
Outcome:
After three weeks online, the site had 250 bears registered. Most of them in different parts of Sweden, but there were also bears in Australia, Germany, USA, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands.
The site, teddybearhunt.one, appeared in four newspapers and I got interviewed for two of these.
We quickly noticed some limitations in the off the shelf map solution, e.g. that the mapping data was not very accurate. This resulted in users requesting edits of bear locations which had to be made by me manually. Most of the efforts in the build of the second iteration of the site was put into overcoming these limitations by building a custom solution which was tailored to the needs for this particular site.
Based on the data collected by Google Analytics, it became apparent that a majority of the users accessed the site through mobile devices. When designing the next iteration of the site, mobile first was the mantra.