Ruby On Rails, Design, Simplicity, Web 2.0, Ajax, Mac and Tons of Pizza.

WhatAList: designed for simplicity

Posted by Massimo Sgrelli in Got Things Done - comments are closed

In my last article I shared some lessons learned during WhatAList set up phase. This time I’d like to spend few words about some design decisions we made during the project. After having closed the beta version of our application, we found the design guideline – the user interface we chose – was not completely appropriate.

Do you remember what Getting Real states about decisions?

Don’t take action on an idea for a week and see if it still seems like a great idea after the initial buzz wears off. The extra marinading time will often help your brain come up with an easier solution.

Well, it refers to code decisions, but the same philosophy can be applied seamless to the user interface we created. What seems to be a cool design can suddenly become a nightmare during implementation.

Let’s move to demonstrate what I’m saying. Our initial GUI design was something like the following:

We loved the overall look and feel. It was very attractive. It was one page site: you were never forced to leave this page to use lists, reorder items. You’d got nice DHTML tool tips following the cursor while moving through list items. You’d got fancy basket to drag’n’drop lists to your bookmarks. So, you can say, what’s the problem?

It was damn complicated. Synchronizing tons of Ajax, making it cross browser compatible, showing baskets always on the bottom while you were browsing lists, ... Too much time spent on the GUI and too few on the features. It was wonderful to watch for the first time. The second one it was great too… The third time you got annoyed. Moreover, after having worked very hard on this application, we understood we missed something: features! Adding missing features could be quite complicated because of our design decisions.

So, one night we said ”Stop!”.

In a few hours we fixed a new design guideline:

• White color never fed you up
• Don’t be managed by Ajax. You decide. Use it to simplify.
• If you have time to spend, use it to code essential features
• Pace yourself. Print the layout. Hang it on a wall and watch it every morning. After 2 weeks decide if it’s the one.

Than, we went through a new lighter version of WhaAList, rethinking some features to make it more useful. We got this:

Even if some details are going to be finalized during these days, it’s pretty clear the radical change in the approach we adopted. Light, simple and polite. Closer to cross browser compatibility. In this change we understood why Ruby on Rails can be so powerful, actually. It costs us very little to apply the new way of thinking WhatAList.

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Even if the application isn’t perfect yet, I prefer to exit as soon as possible in order to begin collecting feedbacks through our blog. At the moment we are only waiting for whatalist domain registration to go public.

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