When someone buys into Affino, obviously they get an enormous feature and functionality set - that is a given - all wrapped up in an elegant streamlined, uniform solution. Way beyond the individual features though is a core ingrained value system which is key to the overall user experience. When we design and specify Affino we have the below core values in mind when shaping how useful the system really is.

Many a powerful system has been undone by its underlying complexity and unwieldiness. This is why we pay such special attention to how the day-to-day user experience is, and how easy it is to have oversight of everything and manage the daily tasks. Before any tiny functionality is released for consumption, it undergoes a rigorous testing process to ensure that it has been deployed in the most usable format possible. We tread a tight line in consolidating ultimate power with ultimate ease of use:

Adaptability

Affino facilitates many types of commercial website and covers the main mobile formats, meaning you can evolve your website in any direction and at any time

Agility

Affino is quick in so many different areas - from creating and re-organising designs and structure - through to the serving of extremely complex, multi-layered pages - which seamlessly combine editorial content with media, ecommerce and social interactivity

Ease of Use

Affino features highly intuitive interfaces on both display-side and control-side - with everything in its proper place - for rapid access

Empowerment

The Scope and Scale and relative ease of use for such a powerful system allows all members of staff to take an active part in their company’s Affino website

Learnability

Consistency of tasks and functions throughout the system means that all knowledge of the system, however small, can be re-applied to all the system’s different functions

Productivity

Small teams, even individuals, can achieve sites of enormous scope and scale. Affino is set up to make a big impact and allow for rapid deployment of highly scalable projects

Traceability

Simplicity and ease of finding content, media and settings throughout the system - this includes multiple routes to the same content, as everyone thinks differently

This release sees the biggest leap in Affino’s usability we have ever made. There have been hundreds of improvements made so that Affino is easier to learn and use. The biggest change is the complete reworking of the Control Centre, and although many of the changes are subtle, everything is now within easy reach. Two clicks and a swipe when using tablets or mobiles.

The usability changes go further to make it much easier to set up security, build page designs, style your sites, run stores and tailor the SEO on each Zone. We also removed a great deal of legacy functionality which has allowed us to streamline Affino further and innovate the new flat navigation that you get in this release.

Ecommerce is the second area which has seen some dramatic improvements. We now have Timezone support for the first time in Affino, so that you can run sites and stores across multiple regions on the same instance. Campaign driven commerce is greatly improved with better campaign management, catalogue management, coupon and order management, product search and product drill-down menu.

We have also improved the shopping experience with a great new drop-down shopping basket and the login overlay which allows for improved direct selling of subscriptions / memberships from the login page.

A major new feature is the introduction of the Funding Platform into Affino. People familiar with KickStarter and similar fundraising sites will be at home using the Affino version.

Many more elements have been Zoned particularly within lookups and Analytics, where Channel, Content and Site Analysis are all now Zoned for the first time. This takes Affino further towards our goal of being able to Zone the whole Control Centre. Watch out also for the tweaks we’ve made to the App Bar, they take a bit of getting used to, but you’ll notice that you speed up over time.

Altogether there were nearly 300 projects completed for this release, and we had to re-write the Affino updater to be able to handle the scope of all the changes, making this by far the biggest update yet.

We see Affino 6.0.13 as great foundation release to build on this year, and the changes we’ve made will allow us to drive forward on the plans for 2012 and accelerate Affino’s development moving ahead. Expect another release later in March

This release is primarily focused on Usability, with a whole range of updates for campaign driven ecommerce sites. We continue to be driven by the desire to speed things up for our users, removing un-used functionality is a major aspect of that, and this release is the biggest ‘spring clean’ we’ve ever done for Affino.

With Affino evolving to be more and more touch and mobile driven we have completed a major review of all the aspects which need to be updated over the coming year. Along the way we have identified dozens of little used Affino elements which we have decided to remove rather than update. This will allow us to focus our resources so that we can update all the elements which are used heavily both faster and to make them better than ever. It also clears out a great deal of ‘clutter’ that was serving no great purpose.

Key Enhancements

Control Centre - Less is More

We have removed a fifth of Affino’s Design Elements and reorganised the rest; removed 40% of the Security Clearances and reorganised the rest; reorganised the Control Centre whilst removing 15% of the Controls; simplified Form Styles to make them mobile and tablet optimised; and simplified dozens of interfaces to remove complexity and ‘gotchas’.

In removing and reorganising all these elements and many more, we have greatly simplified Affino and reduced the learning curve for all users and especially new ones. The day to day impact on existing sites will be absolutely minimal since we have extensively researched how Affino sites are being used and which elements are under-used.

A great deal of our focus has also gone into improving the usability of the existing elements. Dozens of management interfaces have been improved, ranging from minor fixes such as adding new filtering options through to complete overhauls. These will add up to a great deal of time saved each day for actively managed sites.

The Control Centre has now been firmly built around each of the ken key management screens, e.g. Publish, Promote, Communicate. Each has its own video guide and all the management tools for that area are immediately accessible from each Centre.

We cover each element in brief which has been removed below, and in more detail in a separate Blog post.

Ecommerce

This

The Old Traffic Light Error Screen (as per screencap below) has been in Affino for nearly a decade - and quite frankly is well passed its sell-by date.

When we first saw Twitter’s Fail Whale, we were a little envious of the simplicity of that error screen, and resolved to do something similar for Affino at some stage in the near future. Of course whales being held airborne by small fluttering birds is hardly relevant to Affino territory - so it took us a wee while to come up with our own visual to represent things being somewhat out of kilter.

I will leave it up to you good viewers to interpret the visual, obviously there are some balls, an elephant and a mouse involved! We sincerely hope you don’t see too much of the above screen, but if you do happen to view it, hopefully you will be ever so slightly amused / bemused by the visual composition.

This screen will be appearing in a forthcoming release - perhaps even this current forthcoming release - Brucie Bonus for first person to call it in.

There is a major programme of developments lined up for Affino in 2012. This post outlines many of the key ones. Whereas 2011 was something of a transitional year for Affino (although we made some great headway see here and here). 2012 will see many key milestones reached which will open up Affino to provide great sites on all devices for great commercial and community based sites.

For an indepth look have a look at the Mindmap here. For a quicker overview see below.

Key Priorities:

• Adaptive Design
• HTML 5
• Usability and Learnability
• Affino 7
• Ecommerce

You can see more details on each of the key priorities below.

We will also maintain attention to:

• Performance
• Security
• Overall Product Quality

In 2011 there were over 1,400 Affino development projects and there’s no reason to think there will be fewer this year. Which means that there will be a lot more that’s not on this list.

Note that as always priorities are open to change, however all elements outlined are firmly on the Affino roadmap and will be rolled out at some point in 2012.

Adaptive Design

Affino’s approach to Mobiles and Tablets is Adaptive Design, as opposed to Responsive Design. Responsive Design repurposes existing assets for different design factors and can be very slow on mobile, especially for media, it also so doesn’t optimize user interfaces as far as they could be.

Adaptive Design means tailored interfaces for mobile and tablets, optimized for different form factors and OSs. This means that we’ll be tailoring the way different elements in Affino work on different form factors, and whilst you will need to put thought into how you lay out your mobile sites in particular, much of what Affino does will be to handle the transition between devices gracefully.

We’ll also be rolling out a Mobile App API which initially will support iOS and Android.

HTML 5

HTML 5 is a term which actually covers a lot of developments which are aimed at providing native browser capabilities to replace many plugins, in particular to replace Flash. We started replacing Flash elements in Affino over a year ago and the goal this year is to replace all remaining Flash / Flex elements with native browser elements. We won’t just be replacing them, we’ll be

If Ecommerce is a big part of what you do with your Affino site then this is a great release for you. It’s especially good if you’re using Affino for running multiple Zones, Stores, Campaigns and regions.

There are some great new ecommerce capabilities such as the Supplier Management, Product Drill Down Menu DE and Recently Viewed Products DE. Of all the updates in this release approximately 50 are directly ecommerce related and pretty much all the remainder are directly related to running better online stores.

The single most significant development is the Detail Skin which allows you to have a different skin when viewing details and listings. This is most significant for online stores where you can really tailor the page design to maximize the conversion rates.

Campaigns, Micro Blogs and Salesforce.com integration also get big updates in this release.

I can totally see what the BBC is trying to achieve with their New Home Page Design, and largely I applaud their efforts, but not necessarily the results. All of us Web Professionals know that there is always a trade-off between functionality, usability and aethetics. With the acceletared rate of tablet uptake, particularly ’iPads’, we are seeing more and more tablet-style navigations as part of generic website design. Gone is the old-fashioned paging of the traditional internet screens, to be replaced by horizontally swiped pages and infinite vertical scrolling - I have a feeling eBooks will soon have infinite vertical scrolling too - even an automated setting which allow the text to trickle up the page at your pace of reading.

The fundamentals in any interface design though remain the same - focusing and guiding the user through the key information display areas / panels - in a co-ordinated order of hierarchy and prominence. And in the area of information architecture and relative prominence of content highlights, the balance is far from right.

The new above the line design is kind of like a Magazine template - mostly with single item feature tiles - and there is too little difference between the many blocks / tiles to focus the user’s eye properly on a set order of tasks. We then have the more typical Web Content Listing Highlights below the line as it were - Most Popular > What’s On > Explore >.

In the process, we have lost a significant part of the former’s information overview - there are actually far fewer items of content displayed on the screen at any one time, and in a harder-to-read format.

Several of the panels I really like on the current one are missing too - History Highlights are gone, as is the iPlayer Highlights scroller, the Music Highlights etc. etc. What we have as a replacement is much less flexible in its structure and offers content up largely in a less hierarchical fashion.

My neat pockets of information have disappeared - to be replaced by swiped masthead overviews of amorphous blocks which seem somewhat randomly arranged - you get a tile here and there corresponding with the ’Music’ topic, but rarely in the same place twice.

It’s pretty for sure, and zippy to use, but in terms of information retrieval / transparency / discoverability and reproducability it all leaves you feeling

There has been a significant amount in the press recently about Finnish National Library microsite - ’Digitalkoot’ which has managed to combine the best elements of gamification and crowdsourcing to get members of the public to willingly participate in menial data entry.

Hundreds of thousands of documents have been scanned into the national library archives, but a lot of the printed material is too fuzzy for automatic text recognition to work. This is where games ’Mole Bridge’ and ’Mole Hunt’ come in - the first game involves deciphering individual words against the clock, each word becomes a segment of a bridge which helps the moles get to safety; if you are too slow or enter a wrong word, then one or more moles will plummet to their death! The second game ’Mole Hunt’ is more of a verification style game, where you simply approve or reject the suggested transcripts.

Both games are actually easy and tricky at the same time. You need to be very quick for ’Mole Bridge’ and the words are often very hard to decipher and quite long really - also, you really need a Finnish keyboard for the special characters! The system cleverly verifies the words through mass public opinion, and then slots them back in their correct order in the many reference documents they were originally pulled from, quite genius really!

In any case, this social experiment has been brilliantly successful at getting members of the public to do free work in return for just a little recognition via a leaderboard mechanic - where results can also be posted to the major social networking sites.

When I graduated from university and was deciding exactly what to do, I took on a number of tedious office admin jobs - ’Data Entry!’ - which would have benefitted enormously from having some kind of gaming element to make those tasks more enjoyable. The more enjoyable a repetitive task is, the less likely one is to loose focus / interest and therefore start making mistakes. The thing about mundane repetitive tasks is that they are a spiral of ever decreasing results as interest and concentration quickly wanes. The gaming mechanic helps sustain interest and focus, and makes it more enjoyable to participate in mundane repetitive tasks.

With several tasks on the internet, you can make them as usable and learnable as you like, but if they are

A lot of our focus with Affino is on how to improve everyday tasks for people when communicating and selling online. To the extent that it keeps us awake at night. Most of our energies go into delivering customer projects and rolling out major social and commercial enhancements in Affino, however we’re always looking to improve the core system.

Since starting Comrz we’ve focused on this in two ways, firstly by dealing with bugs and niggles. These are the potholes of the user experience, they’re not a big deal individually, but if they’re not taken care of then the whole user experience becomes degraded and users are continuously tripped up (especially beginners). We are investing a lot of resources into fixing all of these as quickly as possible, most are fixed within 30 days.

The second bigger challenge deals with the more fundamental issues of faster page views, improved compatibility, smarter security, cleaner code, improved user experience and exponential productivity breakthroughs. We always look to tackle at least one significant core project in each release and the upcoming 5.5.15 release is no exception. We’re doing four great projects: Clean Code, Live Editor v4, Simple Media Uploads and Structure Copy.

Clean Code

Chrome does not handle JavaScript well. In fact it’s infuriatingly flaky and intermittently displays the JS code within the page. We had hoped that Google would fix this, but there’s been no improvement for months. This has highlighted to us the need to completely re-factor the way we handle JavaScript and CSS code in Affino.

There are many benefits from extracting all the JavaScript and CSS from the dynamically generated code and placing it in dedicated files and ’on-load’ functions: faster page loads, reduced hosting requirement, cheaper content distribution, fewer browser errors, and improved SEO rankings (because the pages are faster, lighter with higher word count concentrations).

We’ve re-factored completely the way we handle the JS and CSS code in the new release. The biggest impact coming from how we generate the Skins (page design and styling code). Behind the scenes, there is also a greatly improved application structure.

The real be... More