Rails and Usability!
September 27, 2006
It is no secret that we are fans of Ruby on Rails. Last night Big in Japan launched Fancast for FX Network’s hit series Nip/Tuck. Most users are impressed with the VoIP and podcast integration, but they were frustrated by the delayed gratifcation associated with the account creation/registration process.
Jeremy Pepper, a public relations pro from Weber Shandwick, spent some time with Fancast and based on his findings we sat down this morning and came up with a new user workflow. The new workflow is simplified, no longer requiring a registration and verification step. Instead, users simply enter their name, email and phone number and a call is generated. Simple. Why didn’t we think of that?
With any standard programming language it would take a week to make the necessary changes on the front and backend to reflect this new workflow. With rails we were able to see the new workflow on our development servers within an hour. By the end of the day those changes will be committed to the production server. Total turn from idea to code: 4 hours. Talk about agile development! With rails you couldn’t figure out how to spend $15MM…
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