
Dabble DB's clever approach to "white" labelling - pg
http://dabbledb.com/blog/?p=87
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e1ven
I have the agree with the developers that this is a Great feature because the
user hardly ever notices it, but it greatly improves his experience.

Having the color scheme work with your logo is what they called a hygiene
factor in business school- You seldom get any praise or notice for it being
there, but you'll LOSE points if the scheme doesn't match..

I think this has to do with the fact that most users tend to worry more about
content than design-

Users think "I need a logo", or "I want a photo of my cat".. They aren't
thinking about Whitespace, or color choices. They're thinking about content.
They're thinking about how to add Foo, not how it will look.

As a application provider (Like so many of us are or want to be) it's our job
to abstract design, and let people focus on content, which what they care
about in the first place.

If users aren't going to think about design, but they are going to feel bad if
you don't have it, they you have three choices-

1) Ignore the problem. This is what MySpace and GeoCities do- They let the
user upload whatever they want, no matter how it might look. The users focus
on content rather on the looks. They'll complain about it, and you'll "lose
points" with them, but they get to have all the widgets they want.

2) Force most users to display it your way, or have experts modify it. This is
what WordPress, Drupal, and other CMS do. The default templates look decent,
and editing them is hard for mere mortals, requiring HTML or Scripting.
Creating new templates may be technically possible, but beyond the scope of
most users

3) Make the user's content look GOOD. This is what Wufoo does with forms, and
Apple's iWeb does for webpages. It lets you add the content, but it adds its
own design special-sauce. This is the model that we should be shooting for for
our Web Apps. How can we make the User's content look good?

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gojomo
Clever.

A logo could also be made the basis for a fun color-picker: display the logo
as a palette on which to click an eye-dropper to select each of the theme
colors. Hell, animate the page look in real time as the user hovers
(psychedelic!), lock-in their choice on click.

It might also be helpful to provide a version of the logo with pixels
regrouped to make all like-pixels contiguous -- easier targetting of disperse
colors. Order groups by brightness, saturation, frequency (a congruent
histogram?), whatever's most pretty in practice.

(If you use this idea in your startup, invite me over for lunch someday.)

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staunch
If this took them a short amount of time then it's clearly worth the effort.
If they spent a lot of time then it seems frivolous and makes me think they
may be avoiding working on the mundane issues that clients would find truly
useful.

Making boring work more interesting can produce amazing results but it can
also be a huge distraction. Either way this is definitely clever and the
concept is probably applicable to all sorts of other features.

P.S.

I still think DabbleDB needs to seriously consider Joe Kraus's reasoning for
why he "positioned JotSpot as a Wiki company". Because I think this "web
database" concept is suicidal.

~~~
andy
>>I think this "web database" concept is suicidal.

Not if they get some clients using it (and paying each month) instead of
developing their own reports.

~~~
staunch
I say it's suicidal because they're trying to create a completely new market
for something called "web databases". Kraus talks about the virtues of riding
waves rather than trying to create them, and I think DabbleDB could really
utilize that advice right now.

The way they position themselves will influence the way the press covers them
and customers view them. It might be the difference between mediocre and
meteoric sales.

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mattculbreth
You know what's cool about this is that they didn't just hand it off to the
designer and say, "go manually pick some colors". They actually thought about
a programmatic approach they could take. It seems like they had some good
knowledge of colors and the way computer draw colors, but they still weren't
graphic designers themselves.

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philc
Kudos for adding (useful) complexity to the application without requiring any
extra user interaction. This is the way to implement features.

