Telstra and Quickflix finally get their JavaScript act together
Nice to see Telstra and Quickflix redesign their sites and finally get some JavaScript skills on board. Good web sites engage their audience. Basic animations like sliding a strip of covers to the left or right are fun to use! There’s no page-refresh wait and we get an instant response to our actions. The page is just more engaging.
Telstra look to have turfed their skinned version of Webflicks (licenced via VNH systems) - good, because this had completely stagnated. I wonder if their new effort is internally developed? Who knows. It’s a bit slow, and still completely inconsistent with their downloads business, but hey - progress is being made. Good to see they are using prototype for their JavaScript library. Quickflix have gone with Yahoo. Both are good, solid choices. I use my own library, augmented with the DomAPI. The DomAPI was way ahead of it’s time years ago, but prototype, dojo, yui have now caught up and have a huge amount of momentum behind them. At some point I’ll consider swapping DomApi out for one of the others, but for the moment I’ve got all the GUI richness you can poke a stick at - sliding cover strips, resizing cover art, buttons that actually depress, tabs .. you name it.
Nice also to see Telstra have stretched their UI to 990px wide - hello Quickflix? Still at 800 - news flash, the majority of displays are 1024 wide these days - use it! APPLEBOX of course can go full screen width: 800, 1024, 1440, 1660 - you name it.
The bar is being raised. ezydvd.com.au suddenly looks sooo first generation. Massive traffic, but there comes a time when you have just gotta move with the times ….
November 7th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Hi Simon,
My name is, through some form of good fortune, also Simon and I am the interface designer at Quickflix. Thanks for noticing and commenting on the new rework of the design of our site. We are constantly working on new and enhanced layouts. I wish to respond to your comment about the width of our site just quickly if I may.
User demographics are very important in designing a site, as I am sure you know. At Quickflix our site user statistics have shown while the larger screen sizes are becoming more of the norm, as you say, we still see a surprisingly large percentage of our users on the classic 800×600 screen size. We could have blown these users off and gone with a larger screen width, made concessions in our design to accommodate a liquid layout, or had to wrestle with which bits of content will be hidden on these people screens. We chose to stick with our familiar page width for now, but I can assure you we have new and exciting enhancements in the works.
Why so many users on smaller screen sizes you may ask? I have pondered this myself, as my job means I must take into account many aspects of our user base, including browser spread, browser capabilities, accessibility and demographics. I came to a very loose assumption based on the statistics I have access to, and while I have no way of confirming this other than ringing our members around Australia this is the best I get:
From my experience of working on projects to aid people in remote areas of Australia get internet access I have found users in these regional areas tend to be on slow connections, with older PCs. You’d be surprised how many users are still restricted to 14,400 or 28,800 kbps modems. They usually have no reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest machines and are quite happy to make do with older pc’s that the tech savvy amongst us would have given up on years ago.
Quickflix, being the business that it is, attracts a wide range of users, including a rather large number of regional users who like the convenience of our service and the range of titles they have at their fingertips which they would not normally have access to.
Quickflix (and inherently myself) would have been disappointing a lot of loyal members of our service to lower the quality of our website for a collection of users that not only enjoy our service but have also proven loyal and helpful.
I love the Applebox idea. I think it is a fantastic evolution of the video store and I look forward to seeing more of your blog posts in the future.
Keep up the good work.
November 7th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Fair enough - you know your user base better than I do! And yep, your rural constituency is different to my inner Melbourne catchment area. However, I still have a different take on it. Seth Godin exhorts us all to create exceptional products. Good is not good enough. Exceptional is what sets us apart. Exceptional is what makes one person turn to the other and say - ‘Quickflix rocks my boat - check it out’.
In the web world - it’s increasingly hard to be exceptional. And to constrain a design to 800px wide makes that job just that extra degree harder IMO. But nice to see things move ahead - and as I said, nice to see more UI interaction and the YUI libraries put to use. Keep it up!