Simple…Empowering users!
Our goal in release 3.0 is to provide the best user experience regardless of device or O/S technology in use. As part of this release, we are proud to introduce new HTML5 builders for photobooks and photo gifts on phones and tablets, the Smart Design concept for layouts and themes and refreshed and improved user interfaces for all builders. We want to empower your customers by providing you with the tools required reach them wherever they are and, most importantly, whenever and however they want to connect with your services.
We promote project portability
Customers don’t care about technology, device or location when they are creating a photo product. They just want a pleasant and fun user experience and a feature set and flow that is optimized the current device they are using.
But how can you achieve this? As Christian Rondeau, our CTO, writes in a recent blog post HTML5 is the future, but users don’t care: There is a very strong mass movement toward HTML5 and native applications. For companies who have invested heavily in Flash in the past, moving to new technology is already a must. In the process, this technical migration also represents an extraordinary opportunity for companies to rethink and modernize their user interfaces as well as to review what features are truly important to their customers.
Only through offering an integrated, multi-platform solution, can you simultaneously leverage a strategy for desktop, online, mobile and kiosk. Flash and HTML5 both have their individual strengths and limitations when it comes to capability, flexibility and browser compatibility.
In response to this challenge, Mediaclip offers both technologies in a single merchandising, sales and manufacturing eco-system. Both builders rely on the same flexible architecture, proven back-end tools and can take advantage of the same graphic assets library and in house content creation tools.
If you are already a Mediaclip customer, you can continue to use your existing content as well as leverage your existing technology investment, while, at the same time, access the exploding market of tablet and phone users. For nearly the same level of integration effort, you get different builders that can address the specific needs of each type of user; from the “always on the run” mobile consumer to the “creative and scrapbooking” aficionados.
With our solutions you can provide them access and connectivity
The flexibility of our solutions allows you to connect your customer to all of her images, regardless of where they happen to be stored. Using the Mediaclip’s open access architecture, you can seamlessly integrate with social networking image storage sites as well as other third-party cloud sites (maps, stock images, QR code, blogs etc…), leveraging the world of connectivity and cloud accessibility. The same goes for sharing user’s projects. With the MediaClip architecture, projects exist and can be shared with others via email and social networking…even if they haven’t yet been placed in your shopping cart! Not only does this provide extended sales opportunities, it is a good way to let your user engage with you and promote her products (and your brand) to their personal network.
Smart Design layouts and themes help the user create professional looking projects without demanding artistic skills
Creating a photobook from scratch is unsettling for many inexperienced users. This is why the place to “prime the pump” is by offering them some pre-built, inspiring themes that include professionally designed graphic content. They can quickly use these themes to bring their own memories to life. But creating content can be complex, especially when you have to create themes for several products that can be ordered in multiple sizes.
We listen to our customer’s problems at MediaClip and we are proud to announce the availability of the “Smart Design” concept as part of our Version 3.0 release. Smart Design allows you to create themes and layouts that will adjust automatically for changes in final product size. You can even create themes that will apply layout logic during the customer’s creation process, like a photobook theme where page layouts adjust automatically to the orientation and aspect ratio of the user’s photos as they are flowed into the book with “Auto-fill.”
Our design team created more than 300 of these new Smart Design layouts and made them available to the user in the layout tab of the creation tools. These predefined photos and text box combinations can be used by the costumer to change the look of a page without having to edit each individual element. These layouts can be regrouped by style or by number of images, to make it easy for a user to try different formatting and size options without sacrificing the integrity and the balance of their original design. We also added new products in our basic library and include 126 new fonts for even more creativity!
A refreshed look that will appeal to the new breed of younger customers
According to a research done earlier this year by Suite48a Analytics, a younger segment of users is emerging and is starting to create and to print photo products. These young consumers are highly sensitive to the look and feel of a user interface and they are far more likely to connect and interact with a brand if they personally identify with the brand’s image.
In Version 3.0, we actually followed our own advice and took this new release as an opportunity to refresh the look of our existing Flash builder, resulting in a new, clean and more flat design inspired by simplicity. We enlarged the thumbnails for easier image selection and improved the wording of the various warning and tip messages for a more intuitive experience. Even though the functionality may vary from device to device, we redesigned the Flash CSS to not only offer a more user friendly experience, but also to maintain a unified new look with our HTML5 version of the tool. As a result, users will feel at home when moving from one device and access method to another.
You can, of course, create your own look and feel by customizing the U.I. of both builders to reflect your brand image across all channels.
Contact our sales team to learn more about our latest software release.
