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.