idkyolo is an independent technology company. We look for ordinary problems worth solving, and then we take them seriously.
It started with an observation that is easy to make and apparently very hard to act on: most technology is built by people who are completely comfortable with technology. That is not really a criticism — it is a blind spot, and once you notice it you see it everywhere.
Settings buried four screens deep. Words that mean nothing outside an engineering team. A red badge that exists to pull you back rather than to tell you anything. Everyone has quietly learned to work around it, and somewhere along the way we all agreed to call that normal.
We think it is backwards. So we do the unglamorous version instead: pick an ordinary problem — the kind that turns up on a Tuesday rather than in a keynote — and give it more time than it strictly needs. Fewer things, more care.
idk. yolo. The first is what people say when technology stops making sense. The second is a reminder that the hours you spend fighting a menu are hours you do not get back. The company is named after both — the problem, and the reason it is worth fixing.
Three steps, in this order. The middle one is where most of the work happens and where most of our ideas quietly die.
Not a focus group, and not a colleague who already knows how it works. Someone with the actual thing in their hands, doing the actual task. Wherever they hesitate, that is the bug — even if the code is doing exactly what we told it to.
The first version of anything we make is too complicated. Most of the work after that is removing, not adding, until only the part that earns its place is still there.
“Good enough to ship” is where a lot of technology stops. We would rather keep going — the older device, the worse conditions, the worst possible moment to be let down. We will not always get there, but that is what we are aiming at.
The best ideas we have had came from someone describing an ordinary, irritating five minutes of their day. If you have one, we would genuinely like to hear it.