About the target audience. How real the real demo should be.
sergeysmirnov Feb 4, 2009 8:23 PMWhat might be the difference between "Photo Album" as a truly real application and the "Photo Album" as a "real application" we are developing right now?
The very important condition that drives the web project to success is understanding the target audience and satisfy this target audience's needs.
If we were trying to create a "Photo Album" as a competitor to flickr.com, fotki.com, name it, the target audience should be people, photographer and not, who have and want to upload the real photos in order to store them, sort them, print them, sharing them with friends, sale them, slideshow them and so on.
Even our developing "Photo Album" pretend to provide the same functionality, our target audience are Web Application Developers who develop applications using RichFaces and Seam. They will come to the site (or launch it locally) to understand how the blue-print application is working and what programming patterns are recommended to develop the real applications.
I hope, we are on the same page with understanding that our "PhotoAlbum" should look cool, the interface should be predictable and logically correct. Because, if it is not, people will be driven to believe subconsciously that such crappy application is a top that can be reached with the framework and library.
At the same time, we still need to have in mind that our target audience are developer. We should not expect that they will do the same that photographers might do. For example, we do not have to expect that the site will still look great after developers uploaded graphics and left comments. It is highly possible that they will upload pictures from the 'images' folder of they applications and leave "qqqqq"-like comments.
Developers will come to see how things work. So, this information should be available right away like other PhotoAlbum-related features. The good example here is a Booking Demo:
http://demo.flamingo.exadel.com/booking/home.seam .
User can not only registered on http://demo.flamingo.exadel.com/booking/register.seam , but also see the link " What happens when I register?" (at the left column) to read how the registration works.
We should not increase the number of features that might be useful if "Photo Album" were the truly real application. The number of features must be limited to have the explanations of functionality and used patterns are clear and easy to understand. From this point of view the "Booking Demo" is a good example. Even it is about the hotel reservation like expedia.com, it keeps the number of functionality strictly limited and does not expect the real credit card will be entered.
Above, I mentioned that the quality and content of the upload pictures might be far away from the perfect level. So, to guarantee the Wow-like impression from the first flitch, we need to pre-fill the application with "public" albums that user can see visiting the index page. The same content should be packaged in the distribution that developer will launch locally.
The size of the distribution should not be huge. This means that the size of the pictures should not be large. Again, this is a different between our "Photo Album" and flickr.com. Having 3 to 5 Mb photos are important for the printing purpose. We have no reason to allow to upload such huge files as soon as it adds nothing helpful for our target audience.
WDYT?