THE COSMONAUTS

Here is one nice pic of the Vostok iPad Sleeves the girls at Jositajosi crafted for us:

Their original post is here.

I deeply believe that honesty and beauty are two of the most important values in design. We put as much as we could in the redesign of the Search Results page of Minube for flights and hotels and the result has been good. Here it is:

Our assumptions

We (both minube and us) put extreme attention to what information mattered the most and made it stand above the secondary data. These were our main assumptions:

• Price matters most than company.
• Price (usually) matters most than hours.
• There is the cheapest and then the rest.
• Airlines are better recognized by their logos/colors than by their names.
• Some things don’t need to be a in a filter: price ranges, airline, websites searched, etc.
• Those with flexible dates need a different way to look at it.
• It’s easier to redo the search than to refine through ajax.
• Flight and flight back are consecutive, so let’s show them consecutive.
• It’s likely that your choice will be among the first 10 results (although you may want to see more).
• White space helps people identify choices, it makes everything clearer.
• Boxes help you separate between different types of content.
• It’s better to show just the essential data.

Old and new versions side to side

Minube is always quesioning how they do things and how these things can be improved. I like to say that at Vostok we are not good at innovating but at improving. The old version was good. But good as it was it could be, and should be improved. Here you have both versions side to side:

Facts prove it

We know the new one is more beautiful and more honest. Facts prove it. Raúl (Minube’s CEO) told me about the A/B Test results and the main indicators doubled in the new one. You should check Raúl’s post in Spanish about it.

We both believe

It’s a great thing we have clients who share our believes. Working with minube is always of great pleasure. We have a relationship based on trust and shared values. They also think that beauty and honesty are two of most important principles of good design.

We recently noticed that some people miss filling a gift card when sending flowers through floresfrescas.com. We know they miss them because some users later complain about not having that option. This is the solution Mark Mackay came up with:

These are some of the principles we’ve applied here:

• Place the alert as close as possible to the spot where the decision has to be made.
• Add visual feedback that something important is going on (the message flashes) so it is noticeable.
• Change the form (size, color and text) of the confirmation element to make sure the user notices the alert

Here’s the full scene:

If we knew that not noticing the cards was too frequent we’d consider haing another step in the process just for filling the cards. But we are unsure about that and there is no easy way for knowing this (no, usability tests don’t work for that because users pay extra attention when observed). So instead of redesigning the process making it more effective and painful we went with this “user interface hack”.

Today we had some spare time to do an iPad wallpaper feauturing our 3-window rocket. Here’s how it looks and the original file for you to use it:

… and the file (links to the one you have to use, 1024×1024 px.):

Enjoy it.

WARNING: Here comes a rather technical post. Stay away if you are here just for the fancy videos and occasional eyecandy…

As part of the rebuilding of Planetaki we’ve switched from MySQL databases to MongoDB. It is quite a big change and the results are already noticeable. You can feel the wond in your face when in front of your planet. It’s fast, very fast.

Sam wrote a post about how it’s all set up. The techie inside you will enjoy it. Here are a few excerpts:

Planetaki caches huge amounts of data from posts all over the internet resulting in very large rows. The result is that the traditional database caching and optimisation techniques just aren’t as effective, and Planetaki was getting progressively slower and harder to manage.

[...]

Planetaki now uses a hybrid solution for storing data. The complex feeds and their entries are stored in MongoDB, and user data is stored in a traditional Postgresql database. This allows us to split the system into two parts, on one side we have the feed “reaping”, and on the other the website which mainly accesses the tables of data.

Read the full article: Planetaki powered by MongoDB

What does Wall Street look like in 8-bits?

Our partners and friends at Riot Cinema (they make movies) just did this amazing video for Unience, a social network of investors. We love it not just becuse of the aesthetics but also because the script is so well written it makes you open an account right away:

Many of you may already know BeBanjo, the multi-talented Madrid start-up that develops software for TV and VOD operators. They recently released Movida, a web-based software that untangles the mess for international and multiplatform rights management.

To make good use of Movida’s release, we helped BeBanjo in the redesign of their website and their branding. Our goal was to help explain their products better, and to create a simple yet handsome and extensible visual system to represent them.

We started off by exploring a western theme, lots of things fitted in without being overtly obvious: BeBanjo’s name, Spain’s history of spaguetti western cinema, and the folksy personalities of the team (in a good way!).

We presented a couple of options with a western theme (boots, cacti, banjos, etc) and they fell in love with the simple shapes of this hat:

So I made a family of hats made out of lines. However, when you use a dark background and clear lines they seem more complex than needed. So we added a simple rule:

In the end we decided on keeping the logos black & white, that way we can throw almost any color or texture and it still look goods (not that we would do it!).

Head over to BeBanjo.com to check out their brand new website and identity. I’ll talk about the website later!

Six Revisions has included our Vostok Theme among a compilation of 20 Beautiful Minimalist WordPress Themes. That is something we are proud of, for sure. But we are even more proud of knowing that more than 65.000 blogs already use it.

Vostok Theme was designed by me (Javier Cañada) and coded by Rubén Lozano quite long ago. I am still confident about most of the design decisions in it, especially those about features and layout. But as screen resolution has increased I feel like type size and column height should be revised.

I’m also considering making a “white version” with the same legibility goals. Or perhaps a Serif version. Do you think that would make sense?

This is the email you get from Floresfrescas.com when you purchase flowers:

We are kinda proud of how it is designed. Its main goal is to minimize uncertainty. Some of its virtues:

• It tells (and shows) right away what did you buy and when it will be delivered.
• Direct invoice download.
• A visual reminder that your flowers will arrive closed and will blossom after.
• Info on what to do if you want to change anything (links, email adresses and even a phone number).
• Minimal visual identity elements from Floresfrescas.com, just so you can identify the email quickly and without reading anything.
• Print-friendly layout.
• It can be read with images disabled (for those malware-aware).

  Confirmation emails are a very important part of a purchase process and sometimes are ignored by interaction designers. Do you have any good examples of this? How would you improve the Floresfrescas one?

Today we replaced our ageing white theme with a minimal theme named Helvetiplanet.

It’s no secret we’re huge Swiss nostalgics, and this is a little homage to one of our favorite typefaces, Helvetica. We hope you don’t mind us being retro-stylish once in a while!

To check it out in action just set ‘Helvetiplanet’ color in your preferences. Don’t have a Planetaki account? Sign up here, it will take you less than a minute, really.

Two weeks ago Google launched Favorite Places: famous people from several cities around the world share their favorite spots on Google Maps. Check this video to see what’s all about:

We, Vostok, were hired by Google to help them design the interface that allows you to browse betweeen cities, celebrities and their favorite places:

We recently redesigned floresfrescas.com, probably the most ambitious project designed and developed at Vostok. It was not only the front store but all of the internal applications: inventory management, courier interfaces and backoffice stuff behind such a business. We could say we rebuilt the whole enchilada. Huge project.

floresfrescas.com is a place to buy nice & fresh flowers in Spain for half the price you would pay at any interflora kiosk. The concept is simple: they carry only three products (roses, multi-flower, and flower of the week bouquets).

We are extremely proud of our work. There are many tiny details in which we put so much care both in design and programming:

• The heading color for the flower of the week changes according to the color of the flower (María spent days on this).
• The muted color palette was designed to allow the freshness and vivacity
  of the flowers really shine.
• Texts are clear and friendly, especially confirmation messages.
  
• Calendars. They rock. You can change delivery dates after your order has been placed. That is done in a really awesome manner, thanks to Sam’s code-wizardy.
• All your account info and configuration is in a single page.
• The homepage is clear and the structure is very flat, you can access
  pretty much any page from there.
• We also redesigned all the Corporate Identity (taking good care of making the brand web-centric instead of logo-centric).
• The 404: Page Not Found rocks

Just as a reference, this is a screenshot of the old website:

The visual difference is outstanding, but we are also very proud of being able to narrow down a 12+ step checkout process into a couple of screens, without overloading the customer with endless error-prone forms.

We hope you like it and (here comes the shameless plug) if you, or one of your loved ones is in Peninsular Spain, try it out!

Minube, a Spanish and French online website where travellers share info about travel destinations, just released their printable traveller guides, which are basically travel guides with user comments, pictures and maps from the place you chose based on your selected categories, tags, etc.

We, Vostok, helped minube designing the creation and personalisation process which you can see on this post at the Minube blog (Spanish).

Ah, here’s an example of what a guide looks like (pdf). Pretty awesome. Congrats to the minube guys!

We are about to launch something big pretty soon… Green light was received and the countdown will start right now. In the meantime feast your eyes on this amazing collection of pictures of launches:

Un, deux, trois, quatre!

We proudly introduce you thecosmonaut.org and its Spanish counterpart elcosmonauta.es: the website for the movie The Cosmonaut which we mentioned some time ago.

Check it out! It has a cool store where you can buy merchandise and become a producer of the movie. The Cosmonaut is special for several reasons:

• The plot is awesome
• The movie is crowdfunded (anybody can be a producer)
• Everything will be released under Creative Commons license, free of cost
• The list of people who support the idea is amazing (in quantity and quality)

We, Vostok, designed and developed the website (in three weeks!!) falling in love with the project and becoming producers too, so expect a little friendly spam every now and then ;)

Tuenti, the leading social network in Spain just semi-released a new version and we, Vostok, collaborated with their design team assessing in usability and interaction design matters. It’s not like we are happy about it, it’s more like we are overflowing with pride.

Tuenti is one of the three most used websites in Spain together with Google and perhaps some online newspaper. Astronomic numbers on usage time, milions of active users and an indecent number of pictures uploaded everyday. It’s the drug our youngsters consume every day in Spain.

The project has not concluded yet and some changes are still to come. Usability testing, user feedback and tons of data help the team make the final adjustments before they release the new version to all users.

The new design includes a few new functionalities, improves legibility and makes easier to do the most common tasks (messaging, uploading pics, creating events…). Most of these changes are hard to see at a glance, they are subtle. They need to be used and *felt*. You know, it’s not just about how it looks but about how it behaves.

If you are in Madrid tomorrow you may want to attend the presentation of El Cosmonauta (The Cosmonaut – Kokmohabt) at Medialab Prado. Nicolás Alcalá and the guys from Riot Cinema will be explaining their project of filming an amazing science fiction movie applying the principles of Creative Commons and crowdfunding.

When: Thursday April 23th, 19:30h.
Where: Medialab-Prado. Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda, 15 · Madrid (map)

As you may know, Vostok is pretty involved in this initiative which we mentione a few posts earlier. We hope you find it as exciting as we do.

Today is April 12th and we celebrate the 58th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space on the Vostok 1 mission. It’s also a great day to make the following announcement:

We, Vostok, will be in charge of designing and producing the internet presence for a movie titled The Cosmonaut. It is special for many reasons, being the topic the most obvious one.Also, the movie will be crowdfunded (everybody will be able to become producer for a small amount of money) and released under Creative Commons license. That itself makes it very unique and special, but that’s not it. It will be filmed in Russian and some of the locations will be there as well. But there is more:

The movie is supported by (among others):

• Roskosmos (the Russian Space Agency)
• Richard Stallman
• Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Boris Volynov
• the Russian Embassy in Spain
• Aeronautics and Astronautics Spanish Museum
• Luis Ruiz de Gopegui (former Director for NASA programs in Spain)
• etc.

The movie is a project by Riot Cinema, to be directed by Nicolás Alcalá, who runs a blog in Spanish with all the progress they are making.

A great day for announcing our collaboration in such a beautiful project. We are extremely excited about it.

Over the weekend we released our brand new one-page website at vostok.es.

During the past few months we’ve had the privilege of working with great clients, both start-ups and multi-nationals. It has been a great pleasure collaborating with partners and friends who understand the virtues of honest, simple, and well-thought design. Vostok’s rockets are still going full-thrust, we will keep you updated on recently completed projects.

This blog is also running under the new domain, but thanks to some ancient Apache magic conjuration you won’t even notice. We’re also giving away some limited-edition Planetaki T-Shirts, just pay the shipping and we will send it via a reliable courier. To get yours just visit our new website.

If you are—in any way—involved with TV programming or operations, you should be aware of BeBanjo. They are preparing a suite of products that will allow your team and providers to collaborate online seamlessly, and their product kicks ass.

Over the last couple of months Vostok has had the pleasure of teaming up with BeBanjo, a start-up composed of an Elite Team of A-Players. We are very flattered to be mentioned as collaborators at their brand-new website, as we share many traits: passion for simplicity, staying lean and mean, and being obssesive about what really matters. Working with them has been a thrill, as their agile development turns our interaction design deliverables into The Real Thing in a matter of days.