October 1st, 2009
Mozilla Prism Website Launched!
There aren’t many things that do what Mozilla Prism does. Prism is an application created by Mozilla Labs that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop, instantly, with no work/coding on the part of the user. A combination of the product’s uniqueness and Mozilla’s ideals of openness made telling the story of Prism a really enjoyable challenge for the Flickerbox team. As users first look at the new platform, it’s important that the Prism Website communicate the product’s unique user experience-enhancing features in both content and design. Led by Producer Hunter Hubby, Flickerbox spent a great deal of time collaborating with Mozilla from design through to implementation. There’s something about working with a team that brands itself as a ‘Lab’ that truly encourages the inventive spirit of trying a combination of different things to see what works. Lead designer, Todd Collins, was allowed to run with a couple of dramatically different layouts and design elements, and I know we all had a lot of fun playing around with the Prism rainbow branding. Co-partners in programming, Roger Anderson and BB Said, both had a hand in the building out and implementation of the site. The Prism site was launched in May. Check it out.
Mozilla, whenever you’d like to build another site, please give us a call. It was a lot of fun.
-Elizabeth Belg
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July 15th, 2009
Brought to you by Symbian and Flickerbox
Earlier this month, Flickerbox designed posters, postcards, and stickers for Laura Merling of Symbian.org to promote Symbian’s Hack-a-thon event at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2009, June 8-12, in San Francisco.
With 3 days to complete the project, it was a great team effort and quick coordination with Laura on the content development. Tom Risse, one of our rockstar Designers, worked on the concept and design, and Lily Lam, calm and collected stand-in Producer, worked alongside Laura on the hectic one-day content development and print coordination. Laura was committed to the project, easy to collaborate with, just ran with what was thrown at her, and still delivered a smile at the end of a long day.
A job well done by Tom on the visual side of things, quick handle on client revisions, and having to work through a power outage due to a heavy storm system passing through our Portland Office (literally). Back in SF, the print vendors were on standby with the presses all ready to go. Without a moment to spare, we delivered the final designs to the printers for next day turnaround. A fun-filled Flickerbox production day, to be sure.
The final posters, postcards, and stickers were a big hit; they reinforced the fun, vibrant Symbian energy and messaging. One of the posters even made it on CNET – “Symbian tries to crash Apple’s WWDC party.”
The print vendors we used on this project were Rocket Postcards and Dynamite Digital, both based in San Francisco’s SOMA district. After dropping the “Can you complete this job by tomorrow?” bomb on them, both were incredibly patient, easy to work with, and delivered a quality product in our crazy timeframe. You guys rock!
Final high-fives to Todd and Elizabeth, who kept everyone in the office calm by providing back massages and constant coffee refills (does that even make sense?).
Quote to share – “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” –Henry Ford
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June 23rd, 2009
Do PowerPoint animations Work?
Arstechnica is talking about a recent study with respect to the use of animations in comprehension. The results are surprising. I have suspected this for years but never really had anything to back it up. Animations in your PowerPoint do not help as much as just putting the information on the screen.
“students’ scores, which were a bit below 40 percent correct in the first administration of the quiz. But the animated presentation brought scores up to 71 percent, while the animation-free version got them to 82 percent.”
Before you start animating that PowerPoint think about how your audience will be able to comprehend it.
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June 8th, 2009
Developers Love Flowers (Even the Guys!)
I received a wonderful gift today, flowers! My favorite client, Abaxis, surprised me with a beautiful vase of flowers for my desk. What a great way to start off the week. Thanks to everyone at Abaxis, especially, Valerie, Elyse, and Jennifer.
Flowers From Abaxis!
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June 4th, 2009
Get a Youtube channel
Does your company have a Youtube.com channel started? Well if you are like a lot of other tech companies either you have one or it’s on your To Do list. If you have some marketing videos, product demos, tutorials or customer testimonials, its a great way to get a wider audience or reach people who want to find out about your products, services or your industry.
The case for a youtube channel is very compelling:
- Don’t have to pay for the bandwidth
- Users like the interface
- It’s easy to post files
- You can then embed a version in your site so that they can be found on your site as well
One of the big cons for putting your content on youtube would be that your customers may also find content that is not so flattering as well as content from your competitors up there as well.
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March 17th, 2009
Boomi.com
News from the ever-expanding SaaS/PaaS universe that seems to be our client list – our newest client, Boomi relaunched their corporate website (http://www.boomi.com/) last nite. Boomi’s product, Boomi AtomSphereSM is the industry’s first integration platform-as-a-service. The idea is that Boomi lets you connect any combination of cloud and on-premise applications that you run, together, without any software or appliances. It’s a pretty cool service, actually, and the apps that they connect with are growing by the minute. Most of the time, you don’t even have to build your own connector – they have a mess of pre-built connectors that are ready to go (right, pre-made). Check out their supported applications for a list of the apps they currently connect with. I know Salesforce is a particularly popular one.
Lots of work went into the redesign and development of this site. Todd Collins, one of our senior designers, was the mastermind behind the visual design. I particularly like the strong use of color and the, what i think is, unique reverse tab header. The site is built in a CMS, specifically, Drupal, and was wholly managed and developed by our man BB Said.
Nuff said for the launch. More from the combined world of Boomi and Flickerbox soon, I’m sure.
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December 26th, 2008
Good design as a customer service tool
My wife and I recently got iPhones after our previous cell phone plan expired. Apple does a really good job of managing the user experience of the purchase, from being able to make an appointment to buy and setup your phone, all the way through purchasing and setting it up.
What I got the other day was the other half of that alliance, which was the bill from AT&T for the phone service and setup. Here is where the process broke down. The world is filled with stories of unreadable phone bills and “Brazil-like” service and billing snafus, but mine is a simple one. The design of the bill.
It’s not that there was anything out of place on the bill, it’s just that it was hard to understand and to follow, and when you can’t follow the process for how they came up with the charges, it makes the total that you have to pay on the bill a little hard to swallow. I was just about to call customer service, when I had a better idea. I would break out a spreadsheet and total up the charges myself to see where my confusion was.
Since there are two phones on the bill, there are of course, two of everything. Add to this AT&T charging us for the service of our previous billing period (November) as well as charging us for our current billing period (December). There are one-time charges for each of us to setup each phone, as well as data plan and text message charges for each phone in each billing period. One more thing and that’s the taxes and fees and you have everything just about covered. This sounds like a lot of individual charges and you can just imagine people staring in bewilderment at their bill when they get it.
Once I got all the charges in my spreadsheet it was easy for me to quickly see that my bill was not really any different than I thought it would be when I bought the phone. What I realized the bill suffered from, was to much detail and not enough summary. While I don’t think there is anything the phone company can do about the detail part of the bill, I’m sure there are all sorts of regulations about the size of the font for each service charge, they can help customers better understand their charges by adding a few lines of summary for each phone.
Currently they have a by phone total for the whole bill, my suggestion would be that they add a summary line total for each phone for each month and a summary line for each months bill. Another nice break out would be a summary line total for “One-Time” setup charges, to make sure the customer knows that these will not be part of future bills. Bonus points for showing an average amount of future bills based on previous totals.
Some simple little lines to better illustrate how the bill is divided up can, save a whole lot of customer service time and headache. Especially when customers are watching their wallets. Not everyone is willing to breakout their Excel spreadsheets to figure out their phone bill.
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December 11th, 2008
The death of the mouse has been greatly exagerated
I was listening to the radio recently when the commentator cited an analyst report that said that the mouse, which was invented some 30 years ago, would be fazed out in the next 3-5 years. And with videos like this one from Jeff Han at the Ted conference it seems like its just around the corner. But after shopping for a new mouse the other day at Best Buy, I’m not so sure.
If you ever watched a parent or grandparent use a current computer, you will realize that even after 20 years of ubiquitous use around the computer industry, there are lots of users who still have a problem with how the mouse / cursor paradigm works. Imagine trying to instill a new multi-touch pattern on current and future software and how it impacts the people who use it.
Aside from the years of work people have put into the mouse paradigm, if you have any idea of how computer operating systems are made, you have a good idea how hard this would be to do inside of 10 years, much less to do it in 3-5 years. Remember that it just took 6 years for the largest manufacturer of OSs, Microsoft, to change its operating system from Windows XP to Windows Vista.
I have no doubt that the touch-screen idea will take off at some point especially thanks to products like Apple’s iPhone, but if you’ve ever used the keyboard on the iPhone you have a good idea how far the implementation has to go before it becomes the dominate way in which we interact with computers.
Everyone wants to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report, but I think we will have to wait a little longer.
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December 11th, 2008
Small Utilities – The right tool for the right job.
The phrase “The right tool for the right job” applies to software as well as working on projects around the house. If you’ve ever tried to take a nail out with pliers instead of the back end of a good hammer or tried to open a can with a knife instead of a can opener you can appreciate this.
I had to do some quick video edits recently and I was hard pressed to find something built into the Windows Media Player that made this as simple as “Save As”. The kind of edits I’m talking about are just as simple as saving out a portion of the time code as a separate movie.
If you look around for a little bit you will find a Windows utility called Windows Media Encoder which includes Media Encoder, File Editor, Profile Editor and Stream Editor. The File Editor portion of this is exactly the tool I was looking for. A really simple tool to save out portions of a WMV file.
The question that came to mind after I used the tool was, Why isn’t this part of the Windows Media install?
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October 9th, 2008
(mt) Media Temple Relocation
We’re big on standardization because it helps us to squeeze every last drop of productivity from each task that we complete. Naturally, hosting providers are a prime opportunity for process improvements and we’ve been reluctant to switch hosting providers until there’s a really solid set of benefits that we’ll see when working on website maintenance tasks for our clients.
Some of the providers we’ve used in the past include: Sirius, Best Internet, Interland, Hostway, and Dreamhost. All of these providers have served their purposes well and depending on the time period, some were stellar and others were less so.
Our newest hosting provider is (mt) Media Temple and we’ve decided to go with their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual plan for our own site as well as our client’s sites.
We’re switching to (mt) because they have built a solid reputation as a stable provider with great support, a great control panel (Account Center), Plesk for hosting control (love it or hate it), access to a lot of developer tools, including make, curl, subversion (svn), and root access if you really think you need it.
The migration to Media Temple has been smooth thus far. We evaluated the (gs) Grid-Service plan and although the control panel is really nice we opted for the Dedicated-Virtual plan because the database access was available via localhost. This detail makes a big difference for WordPress and Drupal based sites and is well worth the extra expense. A number of our client sites have been relocated already and we’re close to completing the transfer of all out internal sites to Media Temple as well.
Previously we had been recommending DreamHost, I love their control panel, the ability to configure independent multi-site environments with sandboxed user permissions, access to svn binaries via ssh for deployment and rollbacks. Unfortunately, their lack of telephone support (I’m still waiting for a callback from months ago), poor reputation, and loosely maintained status blog eventually became deal-breakers.
I’ve noticed that we’re in good company at Media Temple and look forward to a long productive stay at our new hosting provider.
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