Vocino Labs

This is one of the cleanest and most complete Flex applications I’ve seen.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of having lunch with Carlos Garcia, CEO & Co-founder of Scrapblog — a very cool app that enables everyday people (read: non-technophiles) to express themselves online in a creative way.

It’s a really neat interface with a lot of bad ass usability behind it.

Get Started

One usability aspect that hits you immediately is the ability to jump right in.

The very first thing you do upon reaching Scrapblog (after getting the gist of what it is from the splash page) is click the “Get Started” button and launch right into the core of the application. You start creating your first Scrapblog in seconds — rather than setting up an account first.

I wonder how this model would work for some other photo sharing sites, like Flickr. Would it be feasible to allow users to jump in and upload photos then create an account to house them. Side note: I haven’t been logged out of Flickr for so damn long, it’s possible they already do this but I don’t know.

Just Works

I know this is somewhat of a “Duh” type of point to make. But, I love when I instinctually do something and it just works.

For example, I wanted to move my import window over so I could see the theme in the background. Naturally, without thinking, I just clicked some whitespace on the window and dragged — worked. Those little things are what add up to great interface design and make users feel comfortable using web applications as desktop-replacements.

Although it a certain extent this is your standard Flex type of usability, it makes me want this kind of interaction with more web applications. As we move toward using more and more web replacements to standard installed software, the test will certainly be the ability to interact on a level on or above that of what I’m used to with my iPhotos, iMovies, iCals, and iStuffs…

Themes

Scrapblog has some good freelance designers contributing new themes all the time. All the theme elements are very nicely done — with perfect transparency, very complete element sets and more.

The excellent and thorough theme sets combined with the freedom the interface gives you really allows your average user to create some pretty nice designs.

New Things and The Community

What will really start to take Scrapblog to the next level is the evolution of their community features. As that part of the site gets developed more and additional tools are introduced, there will definitely be a substantial userbase creating some great content.

With all the profiles out there that are either centered around photos or where photos represent a large part of the site, using a tool like this will put a lot of power into the hands of people who want to get creative but may not have the technology or the means to do it from scratch. You can keep up with the progress on their blog — I love a company that loves transparency and keeping in touch with their userbase.