CorePage is "an instant link page system." Its About page gives a hat tip to Getting Real:
We'd like to acknowledge the inspiration and information we received from a great web application development company called 37signals.Many of us at Revixio have used their products for years and are unabashedly huge fans. We also read and recommend their book, "Getting Real" and adopted their iterative development process in the creation of CorePage. We built CorePage using Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework that they pioneered. Finally, thanks to their CEO, Jason Fried, for his advice and inspiration.
We wanted to find out more so we asked David Peltz, Founder and CEO, of Revixio Software to tells how his team used Getting Real to build CorePage, "The Instant Link Page System."
It seems a little weird, frankly, to be telling the world how we read this great book about how to build a successful web application. After all, we're a group of four partners with a track record of building successful web applications, web sites and multimedia projects — for other people.So, when the time felt right for these friends and former collaborators to form their own company, I, having recently read "Getting Real," proposed an unusual idea; "Let's not do it the way we've always done it. Let's try to enjoy the process and adopt the methods of an already successful company that we all admire, 37signals, and do it their way." As with many start-ups, most of us were going to be working on this project on a part time basis, at least initially, and those who were already working full time didn't relish the idea of simply doing more of the same work at night. So, once the other partners had their own copies of the book (we splurged on the paperback), and committed to it, we were on our way.
A look at the CorePage app.
We were aware of the growing reputation of Ruby on Rails as the platform that professional developers chose for their own personal projects (over PHP and .net), and that it was known to be "fun." We learned that it was in use by some very big players, like Twitter. So, after some further research, we agreed on that.We had always wanted to work the way that was outlined in the book; getting the majority of the UI nailed down first, and using that as a blueprint for coding, rather than page after page of functional specs, so that part was an easy sell. In fact, as I spoke with others involved in application development that I told about this, they were jealous that their companies didn't work this way. It not only made sense, but really allowed us to see things from the user's point of view very early on. I'm not very good with HTML, so I decided to make a clickable model in PowerPoint in order to share the vision with my partners. They loved it, and as was suggested in the book, we went through a great number of iterations, showing it to potential users and refining it before any kind of coding was started. This method also allowed us to "test" features before building them, so we could determine which were important, and which weren't.
The idea of keeping budget and timeline fixed, and instead flexing scope, meaning the feature set, was going to be our greatest challenge. In fact, given our unfamiliarity with working on a project like this on a part-time basis, it was ultimately a challenge that we'll do better with next time.
We also really appreciated the points about the importance of text in the UI, and how we should consider the choice of words as thoughtfully as we do every other element of the UI. We went on to pick-up a couple of copies of another 37signals book, "Defensive Design for the Web" to get more ideas on how to deal with error messages.
The marketing suggestions in the book were also very helpful, and we're now executing our blogging strategy, along with other social media tactics.
Ultimately, we took from the book all that made sense for us. Iterative development is a great way to work, and we will continue to refine CorePage as we get more and more user feedback. I'm sure we're a bit heavier on the feature set than 37signals would be, but that's what worked for us. The fact that we put an acknowledgement to 37signals on the "about us" page of our marketing site should serve as the ultimate endorsement of this book, which we are happy to give.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
