DIITU Wins Startup Design Framework Competition

ResourcesAndrian • January 22, 2014 • 5 minutes READ

Designmodo is pleased to announce the winner of the Startup Design Framework contest. The contest, which started with the new year, allowed one small business website owner to share the story of their product here with you.

We saw dozens of great projects during the contest and hope you keep sharing those with us on Designmodo.

But without further adieu, we introduce you to this year’s winner, DIITU. Here’s what Fisher Yu, CEO of DIITU had to say about his company and Startup Framework.

Overview of DIITU

DIITU is a brand of collective memory, the service is designed to bring people a simple experience to link and share moments.

Most of the time, a group creates a memory – family gatherings, parties, weddings, corporate events, sporting events, concerts. The need to link and share this memory with the entire group is simple but real; that’s why we use social networks, web albums, or cloud drives to share images.

However, DIITU found that existing solution is far from ideal. A single event memory is often scattered among friends’ timelines. Not to mention some participants might not be in your social network. Using the above mediums, collective memory cannot be effectively shared and viewed in its entirety.

And that’s the motivation behind DIITU, an elegant service optimized for your life stories, moments or brand memories.

Interview with Fisher Yu

Fisher Yu, let’s start with a few words about yourself: Who are you, where do you live, and what’s your job?

Hi! I’m Fisher Yu from Tainan, Taiwan. It’s our honor to win the competition and get the awesome Startup Design Framework. DIITU team is located in Taipei, Taiwan; and my focus is on server side development and on the team coordination.

What event in your life made you create DIITU? What did you start with?

The major inspiration came from my sons; DIITU is originated with a father’s love. I want to cherish every event with my babies and there was no good solution to link and share the moments, not to mention the family gatherings.

After several brainstorming sessions, we feel excited extending this idea to general events because this would definitely an amazing project, the first project optimized for collective memory.

Why DIITU? Where did the name come from?

DIITU has similar pronunciation as the word “map” in Chinese. Each event memory contains at least a place on a map, time and information. We call us DIITU, taking double “i” as “time” and “information” and the pronunciation as “map,” to declare our objective to be a brand of collective memory.

Prior to creating DIITU, had you ever tried to create other projects? What were they like?

Prior to DIITU, we developed social-location-mobile services/apps for customers. Also, I have more than 10 years experience in developing internet services. Before 2010, I had created some VoIP (voice over IP) services and the cloud storage services. The latter service model is similar to Dropbox.

Tell about the team creating DIITU service, how many developers and designers does it include?

So far, DIITU has five team members, including three full-time developers and one part-time designer. We have a thirst for a design partner. (Please feel free to contact us if you love our dream and have any to refer.)

What services and tools are used by the team of designers and developers to ease the creation of DIITU?

Pretty good question. We use pencil/paper to image the outlook, then Photoshop and Keynote with Keynotopia to mockup our iOS/Android prototype. We also use Evernote and Dropbox to sync ideas and design.

You said that you’re from Taiwan, and would like to open an office in China. Which market was this service initially intended for? What do you expect?

China is the fastest growing market and has short geographic distance with Taiwan, we never want miss it. Since China has a closed internet environment, this pushes us to have a local office there. Our initial plan, in the first stage, is to target cities with much more matured 3G/4G infrastructure; then we can focus mainly on improving DIITU, steadily bringing better user experience to DIITU users.

You have a website design. Why did you decide to participate in our competition?

It was lucky for us to participate this competition. We were looking for a framework to ease our load in website development and keep the design elegant. We looked into Startup Framework and found the similar design concept, then we joined the competition.

How and for what purposes are you going to use Startup Design Framework?

We plan to use Startup Design Framework to redesign our services landing page. And then we would plan to refine and develop custom components to build the main DIITU web service.

You received Startup Design Framework several days ago, tell us about your first impression.

Pretty awesome! It contains lots of well-defined UI components and samples. We can easily use them to build an elegant web service in a short time.

In your opinion, to what degree is design important for startups?

It depends on the business type and the company culture. To me, design has same importance as development. DIITU is a design-oriented company, we provide our service with taste, that’s why we put design the first priority in our workflow. We will never stop spending time on shaping DIITU to be the classic design since simple and intuitive last forever. I believe even my babies, our chief testers, will love to use it.

As a CEO what advice do you have for startups? What should be emphasized in first turn?

“WHY?” “Why do you start a new company?” I think the startups should ask themselves and get back the honest answer. If the answer is clear and firm, just dream big and play hard. In the first turn, I would suggest to lean and learn fast from the market to adjust your product.

Thank you for your time; do you have any comments or recommendations for our readers?

Many thanks! We do hope DIITU can help people link and share epic moments in their daily life. Time passes, DIITU reveals.

DIITU will be live in the first quarter of 2014; we sincerely invite you and your friends to land in DIITU.

Designmodo congratulates our winner and hopes DIITU will continue growing, and we will follow its development.

We recommend that all startups try Startup Design Framework, which can help you save time and money when developing web projects.