Usability case study: Kroppr presentation

As webdevelopers, we (Rborn team) alsways asked a lot from our clients. We always believed that being part of a website development, from the client’s point of view, was the easy part – compared, of course, with participating from the coder’s perspective. The client always had the easy tasks while us, the coders, were doing the hard part.

Everything changed when we finished coding our own product – Kroppr image cropping tool – and we had to promote it. In this case, we found ourseves in the other boat: we were the clients, faced with the difficult task of presenting our product to the world.

We knew how to use the product and its features and for us everything was crystal clear: all we had to do was explain it to our visitors…nooooot an easy task. The Mootools developer wanted a very engineer-like approach with simple listed explanations and FAQs while the frontend developer wanted something more visual. We had the same goal, make the visitor understand the product at the first glance, cause we know that nobody has time to read the FAQ/help pages unless he/she’s in trouble and nobody wants to read explanation. We all want to know everything as a first glance.

So what’s more suitable for that than a picture or a demo? What about the two of them combined? The result was to place the demo on the homepage, centered so it can take up the most important area of the page. And then transform the engineer-like written explanations in simple actions that can be done upon the script: rotate here, slide here, press here to cut, save. This way the visitors can play with the script and learn how to use it right from the start.

We managed to create an interface that is self explanatory and intuitive – and I think we were right, because nobody complained about not understanding our script or needing extra help to teach other users how to use it.

• Read "Usability case study: Kroppr presentation"

Kroppr V1.2

This version v1.2 fixes some problems for certain servers configuration:

– servers that do not allow to write the cropped image into the cache folder, due to a server configuration setting,
– servers with magic_quotes_gpc set to On.

• Read "Kroppr V1.2"

Kroppr: unobtrusive crop script is updated to v1.1

We are happy to announce you the release of the version 1.1 of Kroppr.

This version brings next improvements:
1. Now we have PNG and GIF support, also keeping the JPG
2. We fixed a bug related to correct selection of the image processing component present on the server.
3. We changed the order of the image processing components – now first priority has ImageMagick.
4. We removed E_NOTICE form the error reporting in php.

The new working script can be found on the Kroppr site.

• Read "Kroppr: unobtrusive crop script is updated to v1.1"

Kroppr: image cropping script

Kroppr is an unobtrusive script that will enhance any site that wants to offer an image cropping tool for its visitors.

Unlike other scripts, Kroppr is able to ROTATE, zoom and move the image in the real time without using plugins – such as flash or java. The cropping is done after the user is satisfied with the settings. This way, the load put on the server is minimised and also the visitor’s experience.

The installation is also very simple – add a script tag in the header’s page and a class to the image that must be cropped.

More info on the Kroppr page.

Kroppr – cropping demo video

• Read "Kroppr: image cropping script"