Category Archives: vquence

Sexier new Vquence player

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but haven’t found a good motivation yet. Today I stumbled across the videos from RailsConf2007 on Blip.tv and decided – this is it! I will show off the nice new sexy layout of the Vquence player with this content – after all, we are a rails shop (apart from all those other programming languages that we use).

Julian has worked over the design of the player in December and done an awesome job. The image pane’s scroll slows down as your reach the left or right border. It works similar to a scrollbar, where if you go to the middle of the image pane, it will scroll to the middle clip in the playlist. As you leave the image pane, it snaps back to focus on the clip that you are currently watching.

The new player also has a lot more text in it. As you mouse over the images, you get the titles of the clips. As you click on the (i) button, you get the annotations of the current clip (click (i) again to make it go away). At the beginning of each clip, there’s a small text reminder at the top that a click on the video will take you to the full video.

And finally – to give the video more space, the transport bar actually disappears as you keep watching and stop interacting with the player. This gives it more of a sit-back experience. The possibility to activate the full-screen display also adds to this experience.

Overall, I am really thrilled how far we have taken the player. Enjoy!

(But should you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement, feel free to shoot me an email or leave a comment.)

Usability testing for Web2.0 sites

Let’s say: you run a Web2.0 site. And you know it’s not perfect (no website is perfect – people just make do with what’s there). And you are actually determined to improve it. Who do you ask?

No: I am not asking you to send me a quote – go away! I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a professional agency to undertake usability testing and get some cool new designs for the interface and processes. Chances are I find out later that this apparently “perfect” solution makes processes too complex or uses the wrong colours for our audience or … well, it’s wrong again in some aspect. Our Web 2.0 site is targeted at teenagers and I predict that no agency out there can give me the right feedback – simply because they are corporate.

The solution is very simple indeed – and it will make for a few very happy teenagers – happy to be able to have input into a new online site and to tell their friends about it. All you need to do is ask a few intelligent and outspoken teenagers for a bit of time and invite them to your office or home for a few hours to do some semi-formal usability testing. You shall be amazed about the results!

I’d like to say special thanks to Charlotte, Will, Peter and Alice for taking the time on Friday for 3 hours to do a thorough usability testing exercise with us at Vquence. It was a lot of fun – and I dare say: for everyone involved. Here is the schedule that we followed.

We started with an introductory 30 min where everybody, including the testers, introduced themselves and we started talking about what we do online, what we love and what we hate – including the testers. This is important because you break down the barriers and create trust.

Then we had a questionnaire for them to fill in (the middle part of the schedule). It took them through the functionality of the site in a logical manner, asking for feedback on the design, the processes, the functionality and the usefulness of the site.

Then we got together again to “vent” all of that frustration. And … boy, did we get feedback! It was totally awesome – the positive feedback actually made us value our previous work a lot higher – and the negative feedback was great because it tells us what to fix or improve. They were quite direct in their criticism and had some great ideas for improvements. Since they know their world and what makes them and their friends click, they are really the only ones who can tell you what is great and what sucks.

Once we fix all the things that we’ve been told, we should probably do another round of testing – with some new teenage blood. But for now, I am extremely happy with the feedback we got – and will need to look for further investment to get all of this great feedback rolled out! 😉

Thanks guys!!

A long story of logins

The new vquence website, that lets you create vquences yourself, has been out for more than a week now. But we were unhappy to talk about it because the login code was screwed up. It all happened in the last minute: a crash between the beauty of design and the reality of Web browsers. Who won? Well …

Between Julian and I, we had decided to do a cool sliding effect for user login and signup (try it out on the site – it’s hard to explain in words). Very Web 2.0 – very shiny. It all worked well and we quite happily ran the code for a long time.

Then came the time that we wanted to give outside users access and that our more security-conscious people suggested to exchange user passwords over https rather than in plaintext. Fair enough – no worries – quick fix to change the protocol, right? Bah – all wrong – because now you have http and https elements on the same Web page needing to talk to each other. Big sandboxing issue in Firefox – and worse in IE.

Anyway – I leave the details of this problem – and the ultimate solution for it – to somebody better suited to explaining it. I will only say that it has cost us days of pain and suffering and bug #93 will forever be remembered.

But – we fixed it – and now you can happily create video playlists on www.vquence.com and share/socialise them. I have one on my facebook page. 🙂

Vquence gets its first real competitor

Today, I heard about SlapVid. SlapVid is a demonstrator built on a p2p system built by 4 CMU graduates and supported by Y Combinator. The SlapVid flash player has similar functionality to the Vquence player in that it concatenates slices of videos from a collection. And – like we did for the Vquence alpha – SlapVid’s website presents the top videos from youtube in their demonstrator. Seems a bit of a copycat. 😉

At the moment, you cannot generate SlapStrips yet, but they’re progressing toward it. So are we – and fast – expect to author vquences by the end of this week!

I for one welcome the arrival of our first competitor (even though SlapVid may not be called a complete competitor, because they largely rely on p2p to provide their service, while we rely on our own infrastructure mainly, which will allow much better control over the user experience). A competitor in the market place validates your ideas and business model. It makes the discussion a lot easier than if you have to explain the concept over and over again. Also, if somebody else is doing it, we’re obviously doing something right. Let’s just try and stay ahead of them. 😉

So you’re waiting for the Vquence beta?

Last night we rolled out some new code onto the Vquence site. We are now fairly happy with the process that we have put in place for creating vquences. That is, us geeks at Vquence are – so we are now allowing friends and family to help us kick it into shape in a closed beta trial. We expect the public beta is not far off now.

YouTube’s new player misses the point

Last week, YouTube brought out a new flash video player. The player had thumbnails of related videos from YouTube content included directly into the embedded video as you moused over it. This provides access to other YouTube videos through any embedded video.

People who have seen what we do over at Vquence noticed the similarity in the user interfaces. They also assumed that therefore the functionality must be the same. However, quite the opposite is true.

YouTube is a video hosting site. People upload videos there to publish them and most probably to re-embed them into their own websites. When you use video hosting, you don’t want your video hosting provider to suddenly display other videos on top of the one you have embedded, since that changes the perception of the page that you have created around the video.

Indeed, YouTube had to take back the mouse-over functionality one day after they introduced it because their users gave them negative feedback.

In contrast, Vquence is a video aggregator. The Vquence video player is for “playlists” (rather: slicecasts or vquences) of videos collected from multiple hosting sites. So, when you embed the Vquence player, you expect display of and easy access to all the videos in the slicecast. It is a very different concept: the aim is not the embedding of a video, but rather the recommendation of multiple videos to your readers. Vquences enable you to share your bookmarked videos in a viewer-friendly fashion. It’s not about embedding videos in your page – it’s about providing hyperlinks to videos by using videos.

Vquence Teaser Site goes online

Last week, we put a new front page on http://www.vqslices.com/, which shows off the concept of “vquences”. A vquence is essentially a collection of video bookmarks presented as a “video mash-up” and in an embeddable “widget”. Or without bullshit: we concatenate 10sec previews of the bookmarked videos into a playlist, which is embeddable into other sites. And since it’s embeddable – here is an example vquence:

This vquence shows some snippets from Missy Higgins videos – she’s such a great singer! If you cannot see it here (due to planet sanetisation), go to http://www.vqslices.com/vq/dXelFQeQCr3kFQaby-aaea .

Vquences are a powerful concept and we’re right now working on the beta website, which will bring authoring to you out there, so you can create your own vquences. Also, we are working towards providing a REST API to register sites with Vquence, and RSS feeds, so you can always keep up to date on the latest vquences. Lot’s of other developments in the pipeline here…

Taglines and Web 2.0

Have you ever tried to come up with a good tagline for a new company? In the times of Web 2.0, taglines seem to matter a lot. They are the essence of the elevator pitch. But because they can only be a maximum of 3-4 words long, they tend to be rather meaning less and just contain content-free Web 2.0 buzzwords. In fact, this has become such a fashion that there is a Web 2.0 bullshit generator.

Up until recently, we had the tagline “Making Video Clickable” for Vquence, because we believed that our slicecasting technology helps hyperlink between videos and make video more web-like. However, this phrase is a poor representation of what Vquence does, what services we offer, and how we’re going to make life better. So, a new tagline was in order.

But what a challenge! You have no idea how difficult it is to come up with three words that capture what a company is about! Sure – I have been to management training courses and they say it is an artform to come up with a good mission statement for a company and that some companies spend tens of thousands of dollars just to get it right. But a tagline!? Well, let me tell you, a tagline is harder than a mission statement – probably because of the word count restriction.

We discussed for weeks, we even used the bullshit generator and it became rather ridiculous – in short, we did some serious brainstorming (whenever we were not coding). Finally, our newest team member came up with what we have for now accepted as our new tagline. It has all the key ingredients: it is techy, personal, raises curiosity, but is still meaningful (we hope). So, let me present our shiny new tagline: “Vquence – Slicecasting your internet”.

And if that’s totally meaningless to you, then you need to go to www.vquence.com and try out our slicecasts to make it real. Hmmm, I like it. 🙂

Vquence technology progress

I’ve been rather quiet about what we actually do at Vquence, but I have to say that the recent months of intense development are coming to fruition and we are secretly enjoying the play with the first version of our new product, while at the same time working on bugs, new features, and on a scalable setup.

For those who have read our website and recent blog entries it will be clear that we are working on video, using flash/flex for the development of a playlist player, and are developing a web application service around these playlists using Ruby on Rails. If you want to be one of the first to try it, you can join our mailing list to be invited to a closed user group trial, which we will start a few weeks from now.

For those curious to find out what we really do, we’ve created a white paper – email me and I will shoot it through.