WorkPizzle
Pizzle
Giving life after the like: every photo posted becomes a sliding puzzle, and you have to solve it to see the picture.
The context
In 2015, with Louis-Jean de Sedouy, we started from a game everyone knows: the sliding puzzle. The idea was to give photos a life after the like, at a time when a posted picture was consumed in a second. The principle: users take a photo, choose the area to hide, and the app turns it into a sliding puzzle they post. To see the picture, their friends have to solve the puzzle.
My role
As co-founder, I handled the entire technical side and the development of the app, over an intense year run by the two of us.
What it changed
User tests confirmed the intuition: turning the viewing of a photo into a game created an engagement that a simple like did not. The project received good feedback and laid the groundwork for user-generated content in game form. It stopped for two reasons. The backend relied on Parse, a service bought by Facebook, which decided to shut it down. At the same time, Louis-Jean and I both joined DVgroup.
What was delivered
A complete social app: taking a photo, choosing the area to hide, generating the puzzle, posting it and having other users solve it, on a Parse backend. User testing sessions ran alongside development.
What remains
A product cannot rest entirely on a service it does not control. When Parse closed, it was not a feature that disappeared, it was the foundation of the app. It is a lesson I apply directly to AI projects today: knowing, from day one, what happens the day the provider changes its terms or closes the door.