Flaming Desks is a blog…

Oh hello. I’m from White October and I’m new here.

While Dave wasn’t looking I decided that the address finder while registering a desk wasn’t accurate enough, so a quick look on the Internets and I found a rather handy post. I would link to it but it seems that over the weekend the poor chaps blog has been hacked by some nice Chinese hacker. So I should just take all the credit myself….

It now should be as accurate as a postcode can be in the UK for most addresses, well the ones I have tried out anyway!

I have also made a few changes to the registration form as per Daves roadmap.

Following on from Rob’s post about our little bit of editorial in Velocity magazine, here’s our feature in full. (Click to enlarge!)

I’m pretty pleased with the front end so far - there are probably one or two bugs that we need to sort out - like being able to close the search box, reset the map to the global map, and make the icons a bit easier to click, but I’m pleased with the interface and I’ve had good feedback.

I also watched someone fill in the registration in a hallway usability test, and spotted the following:

• The company details page asks for the contact name first.  This is confusing since the person I watched started filling in the company name.  It would make sense to put the company first, then the contact details.
• The company description should probably be renamed because people will try and describe their company (we’ll get bland mission statements and marketing blurb), whereas they should be selling their company office as a great place to visit and work.  Just renaming it probably won’t do, we might need some explanation or help.
• We probably need some sort of visual clue as to where you are in the registration process - it’s quite a lengthy one (necessarily) so I’d like people to know what step they’re at and how many are left.
• When it places a marker on the map, it’s too zoomed out - if it gets it wrong it’s not obvious enough.  I think it needs to be zoomed right in at first so that if it hasn’t recognised the address it will be immediately obvious and people will look for a way to fix it (which is easy enough by zooming out and dragging the marker).
• In the search results we need to underline the company names to make it clear they are links because the person I was watching didn’t click on them.

Where next…

I’m pretty clear on the next steps:

1. Login and My Account : we need to get registered users logging in and able to update their details.  We can’t really expect people to use it properly without this.
2. Contact mechanism : just a form at first to contact a company about using their desk PUSH TO GET SOME REAL DESKS LISTEDAt this point, the system will be usable in its most basic form : you can post a desk, and you can find a desk.  We’ve had a lot of interest in it so far, so at this point we should get all of those people who’ve expressed an interest involved and ask them to list their desks.
   
3. Ratings : one of the most common concerns expressed by people we’ve spoken to so far is the trustworthiness of the strangers that you invite into your office.  Ratings, reviews and testimonials are therefore a massive priority.  We’ll have to change the registration process for this too, in order to allow non-desk owners to register without listing a desk.
4. Desk information : we need to allow companies to add multiple desks with pictures of those desks, facilities etc.

Is there anything I’ve missed off?

If any of our regular readers fly out of City airport on occasion (probably on your way to broker some megalithic business deal, no doubt) you could do worse than pick up a copy of Velocity.

Best in-flight magazine known to man.

It’s VLM’s in-flight magazine, and BOY have those guys got their fingers on the pulse of the desk-sharing/networking world!!  That’s right, they’ve only gone and given us a write up complete with incredibly insightful quotes from one of our illustrious founders.

Because they’ve been so nice - and also because the article is one amongst many great reads - I’ve added them to our sidebar.

(Note to self; invite Steve and the Velocity posse to the Desk Burning.)

Social Innovation Camp. (It's a camp, where you innovate about social stuff.)

We’ve applied for this.  It’s a very nice concept actually; likeminded people hooking up to talk about interesting social things… sound familiar?!

Obviously, simply by reading this post, you have tacitly agreed to go and read our application, and then use the comments field at the bottom to leave a ringing endorsement for Flaming Desks to get picked for the camp on the 5th-7th of December.

(Also, if any of you brilliantly awesomely fantastic people from Social Innovation Camp are reading; we are free those dates, and we travel everywhere with big bags of chocolate and beer…)

First off, an apology : progress has been too slow on this project for the last couple of months, mainly because we’re very busy.  However, with a little help from John Wards in the office, we’ve got the full screen map wizardry version of the test site working.  And I think it’s looking brilliant:

http://www.flamingdesks.com/app/

The concept of using the map as the background for the home page of the site is awesome.  There are probably a few gremlins left in it to work out, but as a proof of concept, it’s great.

The search is working well on the front end - type in a city anywhere in the World and it will zoom in and display offices with desks in that city.  Click the icon on the map, or the search result list, and it will pan to the office on the map and display full details in a pane.  All we need now are some desks…

… and as for that, the registration has been tarted up, with amongst other things some icons (thanks to famfamfam for the free icon set).  Apart from the new look, the only thing that’s different to the previous test version here, is the ability to add business categories and a logo.

If I’m honest, the logo has been a bit of a lesson for me.  It’s a little bit clever in that it crops images to fit in a square, but tries not to stretch them by padding the image with the colour it finds in the corners of the logo.  Where I went wrong is that I tried to build in a cropping function where the user could crop their logo to the desired size.  I got tied up in knots, and probably wasted as much time on this as I spent on the entire rest of the project.  It’s not that it’s not possible - I could probably nail it pretty quickly if I came back to it again, but it was a major diversion.   We’d started off the project saying we were going to develop the simplest possible application that would work, in order to test the concept as quickly as possible.  But I got suckered in and started over-engineering a bit of functionality that just wasn’t needed.  Developers are prone to doing this from time to time, and I guess I’ve learnt I’m not immune.  Because time is tight, it’s more important than ever that we keep the development simple.

Anyway, not many of the profiles have a logo in, but if you search for offices in Oxford you’ll see that I’ve put one in for White October.

I’m not sure what to do about the handful of registrations we’ve had so far - I think I’ll keep them in until we’ve added the Login and My Account functionality… which is the next bit to do.  Watch this space.

A chap I know has just launched this new site called Crashpadder. Still in extremely early days, they have produced a platform that allows people to offer space in their homes to travellers and ‘”likeminded people”! It is at the ‘provider’s’ descretion as to whether or not they charge for the place to sleep (I have found a few on there that offer for free) but the principle is very much the same as FD.

Whilst their biggest struggle is clearly going to be getting people to upload their properties etc. the advantage they have (in comparison to FD) is the incentive of being able to charge for your offering. As we have said time and time again, we really need to put emphasis on the networking benefits of offering a desk space free of charge.

One of the things I like about the site is the little attention to detail within a listing’s page … “Bedtime”! I think that this is a really nice little touch. …Not that everyone had filled that part out… but it’s a nice idea! Maybe we could allow desk lenders to state their preferred biscuits seeing as this has already began to establish itself as common Flaming Desks practice!

Anyway, it’s a nice site worth looking at. They’re using the map function quite nicely (not quite to our super-dooper-to-the-edge-with-fancy-overlay-style standard) and in terms of ease of use, I also like the speech bubble type things that pop up on the map not only pointing the locations of the houses available, but also displaying a thumbnail and small breakdown of the house ’stats’! Dave - I am sure you’ll tell me this is a common function that comes as standard, but I like it!

So, generally I think it is quite nice!

Comments anyone?!

This desk has been sitting in the corridor in our offices for a month and no-one has claimed it. We have offered to give it a “warm” home… So what do we think? A good candidate for a bonfire?…

I arrived to hot desk at the Nonsense offices today, for the first time with gifts.  The croissants will hopefully go part way to making up for my occasional loud phone calls.  Rob, who’s suffering under a strict diet before his wedding, missed out but maybe next time I’ll bring him a celery stick or something.

Nick tucks into gifted Croissant

Okay guys, below are the three themes that I’ve designed for the look and feel of Flaming Desks. Simply click on the thumbnails to enlarge!

They should be fairly self explanatory so I will try to keep my chat down to a minimum! With each one, I have followed the same order; starting with the homepage; then clicking through to the search function of ‘Find a desk’; followed by the search results. I think that this is sufficient enough to show the ideas clearly.

Theme 1
With a nice and simple interface, this design is about attention to detail. The homepage (Thumbnail 1) allows you to search for desks straight away meaning one less click from a user journey perspective (compared to the themes following - hence only two thumbnails for this theme!).

I would like to really work at crafting the assets of the page to reflect heat in an attempt to make the Flaming Desks logo itself look hot and bright. A nice little touch like this remains in context with the simplicity of the site design and will give it a real premium look.

Theme 2
Dave, this is the one we hope challenges the hell out of you, excites you, and doesn’t send you running! Is it possible to have the whole background of the browser as the interactive map itself??!

As you can see from my designs, the idea here is that the content of the site is over-layed on over the map. Users are able to select Find or List a desk and the relevant overlay unfolds above the map. Minimize them again and use the map to manually search out desks all over the world!

The nicest touch with this design (as I’m sure you’ll agree) is the hole cut out of the overlay when search results are displayed (Thumbnail 3). The idea here is that by selecting any of the located desks in the results list, and the map will zoom to the correct location of that specific desk, centering it tidily within the hole in the overlay… so Dave, you think this is doable?!

Theme 3
Still using the overlay idea, instead of the map as the background, using some really crisp imagery of nicely burned wood textures could look amazing! The photo I’ve used in these designs was taken by Alec Mills, an amateur photographer I found on Flickr. She has extremely kindly agreed to allow us to use her photo on the blog (and Dave, she will hopefully be providing a higher res version of this for you too). Even if we don’t use the image for the main site, it would be nice to use this in some way. Additionally, I am sure we will get some good photos from our desk burning exercise too, maybe the images could change?! Maybe that’s a conversation for another time!

The homepage (Thumbnail1) is as simple as can be; a nice self contained logo with buttons to ‘Find’ and ‘List’. On clicking one of the buttons, the self contained device then expands out from the center and everything happens within the white box.