wejustblog

When I designed the Widgeous identity, I chose colors which represented the sky and greenery. These are colors that are comfortable to our eyes and thus the thought of idea of blue and green color themed wallpapers came to my mind. Having a nice and comfortable looking desktop is especially important for those who spend long hours in front of a computer screen. So here’s a selection of high resolution blue and green themed wallpapers from my favorite desktop resource.

Lazy Days II by boss019

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continued…

Since this is my first post on wejustblog, I shall begin with a little self-introduction. I am U-Zyn (http://uzyn.com), the CTO of Widgeo.us. I am head of all things technology-related on Widgeo.us, including the system design of Widgeo.us and management of the development team. Being a part of development team myself, I am also the chief code monkey.

t.widgeo.us

Working at Widgeo.us with a bunch of geeks is not only fun, we sometimes also do crazy things together. t.widgeo.us, is a project Aen, our Art Director, and I made together with the free time we get while working on Widgeo.us.

Like many of you, the team members at Widgeo.us all have personal Twitter accounts. On top of that we also have a combined Widgeo.us account to update our followers with happenings around the company and the development. More often than not we find it a chore to be logging in and out of Twitter just to switch accounts to leave updates for different accounts. If you are like us, now you can manage your Twitter accounts with ease with t.widgeo.us.

As of now, t.widgeo.us is still very new, with quite a limited feature set. Though we like to keep things simple, we would most certainly be happy to hear from you. Aen and I will be spending more of our free time working on it as we go along, most importantly we are looking forward to interface t.widgeo.us with the soon-to-be-launched Widgeo.us.

Photo Courtesy of Josh Bancroft

A few hours ago, we did 2 firsts.

We officially launched t.widgeo.us as part of our run-up to the actual beta release and we pushed out our first newsletter. I won’t talk much about t.widgeo.us because I’ll leave the honor of doing that to the guys that built it — Aen and U-Zyn.

I do, however, want to talk a bit about what I’ve learn about creating real value over the past few months…

We knew what we wanted to do but being afraid that what we launched wouldn’t have enough value proposition for the early adopters, we kept beefing up the plans by throwing in more and more features. It didn’t take long to realize that we would take an enormously long time to reach that level of development.

Unknowingly, we had made that mistake of focusing too much on perfection. What Cobalt Paladin had said in an earlier post was pretty much the start of a series of discussions to trim down our roll out plans and to really… focus.

And it’s here that I asked myself, “How are we creating value?” and came to the realization that sure, we would be rolling out a platform where people can use apps that run across multiple communication channels seamlessly and that’ll save people time and save businesses money and all that…

…but that value isn’t realized if no one has something to actually use. So even if we actually had a 10 gazillion dollar solution, keeping it in our vaults would do nothing for people.

I feel that that was an important realization. One that helped me asked a list of other questions to find a good balance between the business and real-life priorities. Maybe if you’re developing something, it’ll be useful to you. And if you have other questions that are worth pondering over, do share

1. Does it actually make life easier? What is the cost of that convenience?
Sometimes we fall into the trap of building something so cool that it blinds us from the fact that it comes at a price. Take the scenario of a new social network user. He joins because it helps him stay connected with his social circle. At a first glance, it does make life easier with the automatic updates of friends particulars and actions. But it probably doesn’t take long for people to realize that eventually it becomes quite a chore to have to clear all the spam invitations and having to always set permissions for the application invitations.

So at the end of the day, was it worth the trade-off? Does the user’s life in general get easier?
If yes, you’re on the right track.

2. Does it come at the price of making someone else’s life more difficult? What impact does this bring?
I asked this because some solutions simply shift the balance of responsibility to other parties. In the case of offering a portal of high-quality suppliers for instance, it would help for businesses which would no longer need to spend as much time doing tedious due diligence. But it does mean that the provider must have a reliable system that can do that due diligence for the users.

In another instance where a platform provides users with a repository of applications built by external developers, it might be easier for end users to find apps, but is the platform able to attract and sustain the developer’s needs (since they would the ones generating applications for users)?

3. Can you sustain that solution or at least attach a business system that makes it sustainable?
This is an important question that always has to be addressed. It would be pointless to create a world-changing solution that lasts 6 months. It’s bad for the business and it’s terrible for the people. To me, it’s akin to giving people a drug, getting them addicted, and then telling them they can’t have it anymore. Do you remember the last time you were hooked on the features of a site only to have it shut down one day? (I felt that sort of deep sadness when Pandora was blocked… of course, it wasn’t their fault in this case)

What do you ask yourself when you try to create value for people?

It’s Saturday and Saturday’s the day to catch the movie “L: Change The World” and write a blog post, it is my turn today.

I have received several emails from people asking me to write this article on what principles the design of the Widgeo.us Blog is based on and why I did certain things in certain ways. So here’s an attempt at a walkthrough with detailed explanations of the rationale behind the design elements you see on this blog.

The Brand

“wejustblog” is in fact a play of the phrase “Widgeo.us Blog”, if you have not noticed. Kah Wee came up with the name while we were going back to the office from lunch in U-Zyn’s car, some weeks ago. We all thought the name was good so I created a logo based on the typography of the original Widgeo.us logo and slapped in there, not too soft-spoken and not too loud.

Typography

I have chosen light, soft brown background colors and very dark grey text. Why not black text on a white background? Text on screen is unlike print. The white on print is paper, which appears neutral. The white on screen however, are illuminated phosphors. Thus the contrast on screen is much higher of that on print. High contrast black on white is highly readable but it also strains the eyes. By lowering the contrast to a more comfortable yet readable level with very dark grey text on light and soft background, you get text that is less migraine-inducing.

Which one is more likely to give you a migraine?

Fat Buttons are the Opposite of Fat Fingers

As the world move towards tiny buttons on mobile phones, web design has to go in the opposite direction. Tiny buttons are a usability disaster. Not only are do they take considerably more effort to aim and press, they are also more difficult to spot. The buttons here are large, colored and understood. The slight 3D effect of the buttons makes them true buttons. Some people have commented that the buttons are distracting. Considering that articles are read top down, the buttons are probably already out of sight by the time you scrolled to this paragraph. Design is usability not compromised by aesthetics.

An Icon is not a Picture

With the rise of Ajax, “loading” animated GIFs are becoming the norm for indicating the wait the user has to go through while requests are being processed. With services like Ajaxload and Load Info, web designers are only spoilt for choice. Instead of using animated GIFs, I opted a more minimalistic approach. As the French Writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. Without the need for images, I simply change the submit button label to say “Loading…” instead. Yes a picture speaks a thousand words, but a icon is hardly able to speak even a hundred words.

Conclusions

That is all there is to it. I did not intend the blog to be complex so it is really that simple. No twenty-page documentations and fifty-page style guidelines. Simple is good design. Good design is as little design as possible. Do you think this blog was well-designed. I would love to have your opinions and criticisms.

This is probably a problem faced by many startups that are in development.

For the past 4 months, it had been our intention to complete Alpha development before opening up the platform to a very small group of developers for evaluation and feedback. It would have been like a pre-beta invitation list. But at the end of that phase, I made the decision to withhold the opening up of our platform until later. Let me explain why and perhaps illicit some feedback.

The Widgeo.us platform has a component that comprises an application developer tool. It’s supposed to make the job of creating applications a lot more intuitive. In fact, we go so far as to say that we’re aiming to have it so intuitive that even non-coders will be able to create simple apps. The problem here is this. Apps that are too simple in nature serve little purpose. I’d hate myself if I allowed Widgeo.us to create a tool that allows everyone to only create apps equivalent to the “Hot Potatoes” and “Vampires and Slayers” apps on facebook…I just don’t see how that improves communication between individuals.

In addition to that, the operative word here is “Application Developer Tool”. Based on our quality control measures, it just didn’t make the mark. Sure, we cleared alpha goals. But if we released it to even a select group of developers, the last thing we want is to have them think we’re a joke and never return.

Of course the dilemma is that if we wait too long into the development, we might be wasting precious time and resources developing stuff that no one wants….

I say, let’s just hold out and give everyone something worthy of at least a decent criticism.

What do you think?