BRCK

UX and QA adventures

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. 18c 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... 18b 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.