BuildABrand.com is a new online service available shortly which will empower you to create and develop your brand, be it for yourself, your company, or whatever. The basic premise is, you give the app a bunch of details about the brand, such as the industries it relates, plus other related info, and the app will quickly generate some brand designs (ie a logo and font design) for use anywhere you want, as well as some pre canned options which we’ll discuss later.

BuildABrand say that the ease and speed of creating a new brand is as fast and simple as registering a domain name. I’m gonna test that, so here’s how it works:

Step 1 – Related Industries

The first thing you have to give BuildABrand is some idea of what industries your brand relates to (that is, after you’ve told the app the name of your brand). The app uses a simple horizontal scroll navigation for you to cycle through the industry sectors. When clicking on a specific sector you are given various options within it to select.

The navigation is smooth and sleek, the icons have been well chosen, giving clarity to what you’re looking at.

I think one area I’d love to see modified slightly would be to allow you to see all the sectors you can choose from, rather than blindly scrolling through them, not knowing what’s coming next, and if it’s relevant. A minor tweak though

Step 2 – Some more detail about your brand

So next up is giving the app some more pointers around your brand, such as Tone, Style, Outlook etc. You select an image from each category which most relates to your brand, with additional helpful keywords explaining your choice to make sure it’s relevant. Very easy, and very quick.

Again, I think one minor tweak that could be made would be to label the images up with their names from the start (perhaps underneath, or as part of the image), so you can instantly see which images are more relevant to you in the gallery. Otherwise though, this is a pretty intuitive way to make your selections, no horrible forms to fill in, no drop downs etc – all easy to press buttons.

Step 3 – Choose a symbol

Now I get to choose a symbol out of a vast gallery presented to me. These symbols are recommendations from BuildABrand based on the decisions I had made in steps 1 & 2. As you can see in the screenshot above, I have 21 pages of 15 symbols, so the choice is quite large. That said, the designs are really good, the team at BuildABrand have worked with some talented folk to get some really interesting designs.

The navigation here works seemlessly with some lovely ajax goodness. It uses a similar effect to that of Panic’s Coda website. Horizontal scrolling is all the rage right now, and BuildABrand have implemented it well.

I am told that the gallery of symbols above is not limited, meaning that designers will be adding to the pool of symbols over time, so it should grow with more and more relevant results. The key for the development team will be to try and give the users enough choice over symbols, but not kill them with too much choice.

So anyway, you select a symbol, and move on. At this point you should ignore the colour scheme presented to you, that is coming up next

Step 4 – Select Colour and Font

The final piece to the puzzle is the font and colour scheme selections. Again, the selections and options presented to you are recommendations from BuildABrand which are most relevant to your brand and symbol you have previously chosen. You can spend 30 seconds here, 30 minutes, or hours depending on how picky you are about it – either way, you’ll have a preview in the middle of what your brand could look like instantly.

That’s it. It’s that simple. As long as you are clear in your mind what you want out of your brand, and what it is, using these 4 steps should give you something very sweet in a really small amount of time.

Brand Created.

What happens next is excellent, you get to see your brand in situ in various ways around the site, inspiring you with different ways you can use it. Banner ads on the site use your new logo and font – for example – one for creating business cards which is 100% relevant to you.

In addition to this, BuildABrand will soon offer WordPress templates pre-built for you with your brand and colour scheme, or you can simply go ahead and download your logo and use it wherever you want. With each download you use up credits, which is the way BuildABrand are monetizing the website.

Business Card Creator

As I said above, the stand out feature for me (well at this stage of the first beta anyway! There is much more to come!!), is the business card creator. The live previews of your business cards are brilliant, as you swap out designs for front and back, as well as adding information such as telephone numbers etc to the card – it’s all there for you to preview instantly.

I don’t think I can say much more about how cool this actually is, other than I seriously considered getting personal business cards at one point – they had me!! I think the only way I could possibly foresee an improvement here is for the ability to edit the information on the card inline, rather than through a web form.

Conclusion

At the start of this article I said I would test BuildABrand’s theory that creating a brand should be as quick and easy as registering a domain. My verdict? Domain registration should be this fun! The app met all expectations in this area, the 4 simple steps really were simple.

What’s really exciting about BuildABrand is the simple fact that this is just the start. Having the ability to build a brand, design business cards, build a wordpress blog template, all from one place is instantly an exciting prospect – and you did it all yourself. I can’t wait to see what the guys come up with next for the app.

If you haven’t already, sign up to get on the beta if you can – otherwise the site will be launching soon.

Follow @buildabrand on Twitter for more or check them out at http://buildabrand.com.

Yesterday I touched upon the fact that we sat on our latest web application launch for Chatterbloc for quite some time. Whilst we were busy people elsewhere, there was always that itchy feeling that it’s not quite ready yet. We had the fear. In this article I will discuss what manifests itself as the fear, and how to push through it.

Perfection is hard to find

The sooner you realise this, the better. Scenario: You don’t release because you’re trying to find the ultimate sweet spot to avoid a backlash. Don’t bother, it’s going to be pretty difficult to achieve if you’re developing within a small team or on your own. In fact, perfection will probably never be achieved. If it was that easy, every app that came out would be a hit and we’d all be basking in each others coding glory.

You need to get to a point where your app is functional, bugs at a minimum, and pretty much does what you set out to do. Once it’s there, get it released. Let the real feedback come in and iterate through the issues. This is the only way you will ever get close to the hallowed sweet spot.

What you don’t want to do is release a pile of crap filled with bugs that instantly turn away potential users. This will turn into a big fail whale pretty sharpish, setting you up for an uphill struggle from there onwards.

Ultimately, make compromises but don’t compromise.

Haters

Like it or not, there are plenty of people out there that are more than happy to tell you how rubbish, boring, useless your application is. It doesn’t matter what I’ve released in the past, there has always been some kind of backlash from a small few. You can do nothing about this.

If we all sat and developed to mitigate every single possible negative outcome, nothing would ever get released, and nothing would progress. You really need to just get on with it, get it out there and take what’s coming to you, coz it’s coming.

Ignore the true haters that add no valuable feedback, but don’t ignore the negative feedback that is actionable. What I mean by this is, “This is rubbish!” is not valuable feedback and should not be taken to heart (unless everyone is saying it). You can’t do anything with that so move on. Feedback like “I don’t like how you’ve done this, it doesn’t make sense” etc is highlighting an actionable problem. Add it to the list, and see if it’s a common issue.

Again, you can’t make everyone happy, so acting on every whim of a user is also fruitless, even before launch. You need to grab common themes and turn them around, as these are the big pain areas.

Lovers

Whilst you would immediately think lovers don’t make up the fear, they do. Whilst you’re worrying about the negatives, you’re also panicking about the effects of a positive turn out. Will the infrastructure hold out? Will users that love our app share it with others and have we facilitated to make that happen?

Again, you could worry about this until the cows come home but you won’t achieve anything. It’s a finger in the air job when talking about capacity. Just make sure you can scale up when you need to. Be prepared.

Also, if users love your app, they will share it. Don’t over worry about having enough ways to share it to the world before launch, but make sure you monitor it and develop your app further post go live to facilitate it.

Money

Fear not, you probably won’t make buckets of cash immediately… so best not worry about that. If you’re concerned that you might not be able to afford escalating hardware costs, then you need to mitigate – get some investment, or put some cash aside.

Although not specifically something that was adding to my fear before we launched, the fear of costs escalating out of control still niggles me. You need to keep a close eye on costs against hardware/servers etc… Don’t let it daunt you.

Conclusion

It’s easier said than done, but the mantra of “release early, release often” cannot be more right. Although I like to have the caveat that you should release early ONLY when the product is functioning well enough to achieve it’s goals. Try to get over the fear of failure, even if your release dives on your first iteration, you’ve got a second chance, so use it. I hope you find this useful…

Resources to help you learn…

jQuery UI 1.6	Designing Interfaces	Learning jQuery 1.3

So, as my avid readers will know, yesterday we launched a new web application called Chatterbloc to the world. Well, I say the world, I actually mean to the HN user base for some feedback, but it’s as close to the world that we’ve gotten over the past 3 months.

Anyway, the feedback came in, and there were some important learnings that I would like to share with you.

Are your features obvious?

This was the biggie for us. We were so close to the project that we missed this minefield completely. Our biggest feature is the web collaboration feature, allowing users to share links in realtime, to say youtube vids, or live streams, or any web page. The trouble is, people didn’t get it. They didn’t realise what the web view was, where the web pages would appear, and how to share links with each other.

Even after a closed beta, this didn’t really come through much. Probably because we were demoing the features to our friends beforehand. Big learning here, you need to make your killer features more intuitive to the users, help them understand quickly how easy it is to use – without writing a book on it. Get people involved that are completely green to the application, don’t tell them anything, and let the opinions come through.

Are your buttons intuitive?

Chatterbloc Freeze Frame Functionality

This was another one where we were so close to the project that the lack of understanding of what a button does completely passed us by. It seems so obvious when you’re working on the development, although we did have reservations about this, we didn’t realise it was completely meaningless to the user…. project blindness!

We had two problems here, one the user didn’t know it was a button, and two they didn’t know what freeze frame meant. We need to iron this one out, or remove the functionality altogether.

Does your homepage accurately reflect your app?

Chatterbloc Homepage Slideshow

This wasn’t such a huge deal for us, we already had a pretty decent slideshow of functionality showcases, however because the slideshow progression is slow, and our main features were 2 or 3 slides in, they were likely not seen.

Within 5 seconds your users should be seeing what the application is all about. The homepage should instantly show them what it is, and why it’s different to everything else. Without this, they’re clueless – as we found out.

Get it out there…

We sat on Chatterbloc for a few months. The closed beta we had at Christmas 2008 is not much different to the product we have now. I closed out a few bugs since and made some fundamental underlying changes, but nothing incredible… So why didn’t we launch 2 months ago?

Well we were all busy elsewhere was one good reason, but the other I think was fear. Fear of reprisals, fear of it not quite being perfect yet, fear of failure. What I can say though is,  we could have never reached perfection anyway, there are always going to be bad things said, bugs and bits not right. You just need to work through them, as fast as you can, to show your user base that you’re listening and doing. Not sitting on your hands, daydreaming.

Conclusion

I hope you find these findings useful, I’m sure there will be more, and I will definitely be letting you know what we find. It’s actually been very useful to write this piece. It’s helped identify the key themes of where we need to focus, so hopefully turn around times will be small. More soon.

Resources to help you learn…

jQuery UI 1.6	Designing Interfaces	Learning jQuery 1.3