Archive for the 'Design' Category

More Reviews for Kinzin

Wow - a whole series of reviews have come out in the wake of Kinzin’s new photo finishing subscriptions. Here’s a small sampling:

Three Kid Circus says:

For the delivery service alone, Kinzin is going to make me look like a rock star. But the online hub for interested family and friends is really cool, too - and keeps all those (photos from my) “Mommy Weekends” safely segregated.

Pumpkin Products chimes in with:

Kinzin allows you to upload pictures and stories to your page. You can create memory books, journals, family newsletters, and even more, all on Kinzin! But my favorite feature of all, by far, and the one that has initiated a truce of sorts with the grandparents, is that you can sign up for an additional service that mails your best 10 photos from every month to the address/es of your choice(…) No one has anymore excuses for why they don’t have pictures of your children featured prominently on their mantle. Plus, it’ll help out those non-computer literate members of your families (we all have ‘em). Zero effort from you, and voila! You’ve kept everyone up to date!

Modern Mama Marvels loves that the invitation process doesn’t require your relatives to go through a cumbersome sign-up process:

It’s an easy, private photo sharing site that even my most technologically-dumb family members can navigate. I was easily able to share our account with them and they were easily able to (…) view the pictures that we uploaded.

Ebony Mommy surprised her Mom with the Kinzin prints:

I chose a surprise tactic in the actual sending of my pictures just to get my family’s first reaction to receiving the images. Each grandmother was thrilled to get pics of their grandsons- one was so excited she called me immediately gleeful in the surprise of these recent pictures. She stated that while she enjoys getting pictures online having the real tangible photographs is something she really treasures. Getting through the protective layers of wrapping to get the special pictures of her boys made the moment even more exciting. Her strong hint that this is the perfect gift idea for families who live apart from grandchildren and loved ones definitely let’s me know we’ll be using Kinzin again…

It’s wonderful to get some positive feedback. We were a little nervous having the reviewers be the first people in to use the new print functionality, but it seems to have worked just as designed (thanks to the best development team ANYWHERE - I love working with these guys).

Design Based On What People Do

Beta Testers Needed For “These Are My Kids”

As a Participatory Designer, I am constantly amazed at how experiences and products are designed solely from the point of view of the people making them. What’s worse is that most people take the blame on themselves when they can’t use something effectively. They automatically assume that it must be their fault that they can’t do something with technology. The next time this happens to you try looking at the design. Was it designed to work with what you do?

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A new form of interactive design called embodied interaction is based on using tangible situations and social approaches to creating new technology. In other words, designing interfaces and objects with an understanding of how people do things in the context of their environments and perceptions.

Currently, Kinzin is designing an application called “These Are My Kids” that can be used on its own on the web and within Facebook to share photos of our kids privately. The Kinzin Team decided to focus on this application because we talked with parents about what they do and how they want to do it. The participation design surrounding this application is fulfilled by providing simple steps to help parents accomplish something they want to do and not something we think they might need. Every design step integrates our team expertise with real world technological challenges.

Another step to making sure this application works is by getting real people with kids to use our first version (beta-version) of “These Are My Kids”. As you can well imagine this means that we need to find people who are already too busy with their families and their jobs to sit down with us and tell us what they think about the way it works. But we know that there are people out there that want to help.

If you are a parent, grandparent, aunt/uncle who lives in or around Vancouver, BC and would like to give us a hand then contact me: Julie AT kinzin DOT com or please comment here.

Are You Normal? One Of The Fastest Growing Facebook Applications

As of this morning, just shy of 2 weeks officially included on the Facebook application map, “Are You Normal?” has added over 25,000 users, making it one of the fastest growing apps on Facebook. That’s an average of 6 users per minute, or roughly one new user every 10 seconds. This morning it hit page one for “recently popular”. We’re pretty pleased, to say the least, as there are over 5,000 applications out there. It was a big moment when we pulled ahead of “Pee on your friends”, and now we just keep moving up! “Are You Normal?” falls under the just-for-fun category of extremely memorable and meaningful ways to waste time in Facebook!

And we’ve introduced a fresh, new design, making it easier for you to move around the app and see your test results and those of your friends. Something else of importance we would like share with you: every week we will be adding a new quiz to test your normalcy. Up this week: “Are you a normal Facebook user?”. (Is anyone?)

Show us your abs, by Trois Tetes (TT)'s on FlickrAs always, we’d like to hear feedback from our users and the community at large. Feel free to leave us a note or post in our Kinzin Builders group and we’d be happy to help you out or answer your questions and suggestions.




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