Mojobaby.com
Concept to execution, building a mobile-enabled photo sharing platform
Mojobaby lets you share pictures from your phone with all of your friends online, instantly. Users send photos taken with their mobile phones to the site to show off what they're up to. They can also take advantage of an embed-able flash widget which instantly displays their latest photos on their blog, MySpace, personal website, etc...
We worked closely with the Mojobaby team to define the design, features and strategy for the production. We then developed the Mojobaby website, three Mojobaby widgets, a Facebook application, and a white-label technology that allows customers to enable their site to accept incoming MMS messages from all major US cell phone carriers.
The user interface was built iteratively and evolved rapidly after the initial launch. Feedback gathered actively through an in-person usability focus group was used along with analysis of successful products in similar areas to tune various aspects. The result is a clean, simple, and intuitive application.
The second major iteration of Mojobaby benefitted greatly from gathering real world feedback. We were able to add tools for users to get more out of the site such as more robust friend management, invitation management, user preferences, and an overview of friends, fans, and postings. In addition to these features we gathered information about how to hone the site's content in order to make things more intuitive and understandable.
Along with features and user interface changes came a significant re-factoring of the code-base and a move to edge Rails to take advantage of it's built-in REST features and ActiveResource API. The user system was also re-engineered using the restful_authentication plugin, and the front-end code cleaned up with the help of HAML & SASS.
In order for Mojobaby to extend its reach beyond its own site we created three widgets and a Facebook application. Among them are a unique tile-based widget with a customizable background-color and size (pictured above) as well as a "coverflow" widget and a dynamically-generated animated GIF widget for use in forums or other places which disallow Flash.
