Question

Topic: Website Critique

Online Digital Scrapbooking

Posted by Anonymous on 10/1/2009 at 6:25 PM ET 250 Points
We have developed an online digital scrapbooking site at www.photoalbum.com. The site has a flash based online design tool, where users can upload artwork of many different formats including raster formats like jpeg, TIFF, PNG with transparency, and vector formats like EPS and PDF. Users can drag and drop art into their online design and can add text, and clip art. Layering and page ordering of designs up to 100 pages with custom designed covers. We have people creating very sophisticated designs that look beautiful. The problem we have is the balance between ease of use and capability. While providing a very powerful tool we also would like to have suggestions for ways to improve the experience for more novice users.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 10/2/2009 at 12:11 PM Moderator
    And your question is ... ??

    The balance between ease-of-use and [technical] capability is best answered by your target audience. Who are you trying to reach and what is your business model? If you're looking for serious artists who are willing to invest a lot of effort to achieve a certain result, then technical capability should take precedent.

    If, on the other hand, you're trying to attract casual users then ease-of-use will be more important. It's that simple.

    Oh, you want to attract everybody and anybody? Time to revise your business plan. Bad idea. May need two different sites/products and two different business/marketing plans if you want everyone.
  • Posted on 10/2/2009 at 2:39 PM Author
    Thanks for your comment, however I think you are still over simplifying it. Consider this, the main target users for the site is scrapbooking enthusiast. These are mostly women who have a keen eye for the design aspect of their projects. The typical project is a very complex design layout that requires a powerful software program to enable these designs to be built. We are providing this powerful tool as a Flash application based at the www.photoalbum.com site.
    But again the issue is that the requirements for the creative expression exceed the technical abilities. So it is not as simple as to target different market segments.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 10/3/2009 at 10:56 AM Member
    First, fix your security certificate. Attempting to register produced the dangerous warning (in Firefox): This Connection is Untrusted /
    You have asked Firefox to connect securely to www.photoalbum.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.

    To make it easier for novices, have video tutorials showing how different people created their amazing scrapbooks.
  • Posted on 10/5/2009 at 9:34 PM Author
    At this point I must accept the fact that I've not articulated our issue in a clear enough fashion, as I've not really received the type of answers that I was looking for. Hopefully I can post a new question with more specific detail that might help to bring out the ideas that we are looking for.

    I would like to express my greatest gratitude to each of you that has answered. Your time is very valuable and I appreciate your effort. This is my first question to this forum and so it was a learning experience for me as well.

    Clearly there are very talented people here and I will give very careful thought to a repost.

    Thank You!
  • Posted by Future Focus on 10/9/2009 at 1:34 PM Moderator
    Question closed and points refunded at authors request.
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