Things are really starting to get better at motigo!
We are very happy to announce the launch of the new account overview. A feature that was both widely requested, but also extremely important in bringing the motigo services together.

When we first launched motigo in the end of March this year, the most important thing for us was just to get motigo up and running. It is now - a few months later - that we can actually start to tweak motigo into being what we actually want. The new account overview and the recent “frontpage redesign”:http://devblog.motigo.com/2007/06/04/redesigning-the-frontpage-step-2/ are some of the more visual steps we have taken in this direction.

As usual, we will give you an insight into the design process.

As opposed to earlier redesigns, we actually didn’t have anything to redesign! The account overview has been non-existent until now. We wanted the new page to fulfill a list of things:

• First of all, the overview should bring all motigo services together: giving an overview
• The page should function as the natural “home page” - the page you always end up on when you want to do something new
• We wanted as much of motigo to be accessible from only one page
• We wanted to communicate the colour scheme of motigo, where each service has its own color

Our first thought was to reuse the toolboxes we have so far used for the forum/guestbook/shorturl admin pages as these had the color of the respective service in the header. The result came to look like this:

We chose to take the approach of designing everything straight and only in HTML instead of taking the usual photoshop way that many designers choose. Doing the design in HTML only gave us several benefits:

• The actual interface is at the center of the attention at first. There is no spec: the interface is the spec.
• An interface is not a wireframe that we can just slice up and magically transform into an HTML document. Neither is it a photoshop mockup.
• Creating a mock-up of the interface in photoshop will produce a design that matches the constraints of photoshop - not the constraints of HTML. We should therefore “embrace the constraints”:http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch03_Embrace_Constraints.php of HTML.
• When we build it only in HTML, we can actually use real and live data while building the design. This helps surfacing problems that photoshop would otherwise hide
• The interface is at life from start. You can click it, try it out, and feel it.
• You will get something that works very soon in the design process
• There is no monster integration in the end.

Although the new and colorful proposal was better than anything we had before (we didn’t have anything) - it was too much. Too colorful and tivoli like. Plus - the boxes approach to showing each service did not always line up nicely, when a user had services in one category than the other.

The next approach was to list the services in one big list and now side-by-side. We removed the colorful header of each service and give it a more settled look:

This however proved to be a little too settled. This meant that we didn’t get to indicate any of the colors of the services. So we added a little bit of color:

Again - this was too much. The final solution would be just to have a small box indicating the color of the service:

We also wanted to add several things to the overview page, so that the user would go there as a natural thing to find just the information he wanted to see. These things included basic information about the logged in user: his name and email, but also the current time in the timezone he had selected. As we have users in many different countries, setting the timezone of your account has huge importance as it will determine the time of your forums and guestbooks as well as the base time in your statistics. We also added links to often used and important documents such as FAQs, terms of service, and of course the developer blog ;-).
All this provided the necessary detail to make the Account overview feel like a real motigo home…

Along with the overview, we’ve also added a toolbox that is placed in the same spot on all admin pages, so that you can always find your way to the most important pages of motigo.com. This continuity was greatly missed in the old version of motigo, why we are relieved that we finally got it online.

We also got rid of the top bar with the list of our services, as we now have this list a more natural place: in the account overview. Instead we added a search bar that we plan on expanding to be able to do more in the near future.

We really hope that the newest updates has helped your experience of motigo.com. We are extremely happy about the release ourselves and hope that you will be as well.

Now, go enjoy the new “motigo”:http://motigo.com

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 9:11 am by Anders Toxboe and is filed under How we work, Usability, Announcements, Motigo updates, New features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.