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).
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).
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:
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:
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.
Check this out. It’s the pre-pre-alpha of our brand new iPhone version of Planetaki. Out from the oven and still hot. Kudos to Sam!
We still need to do a lot of work on many details, especially those related to design so we can keep the same user experience we already have on the website. It’s not done yet but… It works!
Yeah, we will miss her. She loved us, we love her. And with this little homage we finally found a good use for those thousands of avatars we have at Planetaki ;)
It left me thinking about its application to an online service of say… dating. Most of todays online dating websites are based on browsing or searching. In fact it’s a combination of the two, since it’s some sort of filtering (gender, age, location, etc.). But no one, or at least no one that I know, has implemented an online dating system based on recommendations: “Javier, I know you so much I bet this girl is definitely a good match for you”.
I am sooo thinking about it these days.
This will be Vostok’s next project.
Yeah!
I am super-happy to share this news about Planetaki: we already implemented a feature to embed a planet in whatever website you want. Ain’t that cool or what?
If you are a Planetaki user and want to try it out, experiment a bit or just do some good to your website readers, try embedding this ultra-tiny piece of code inside your html:
This makes me very proud since I lead the team who made that possible. I guess I cannot disclose much of the information regarding the project, but I want to congratulate and thank the team who worked really hard to make it possible. We weren’t expecting such success.
This is the paragraph where Madrid’s website is mentioned as one of the best practices all over the world:
Working for the public administration is always dificult. There are many interests and stakeholders which sometimes conflict among themselves and you feel in the middle having to come up with something that compromises all parts and is also what you think it’s best for users. I don’t recall it as an easy project.
Besides, as a professional you have to deliver a plus when working in such projects. Why? For two main reasons:
1. You are being paid with everybody’s money
2. Your users are the Citizens. You work for the public good.
I remember recalling these principles when things used to get tough. It was our big motivation. Now I see it was worth the sacrifice.
