The project
Goldmail was a startup with a tool for sharing synchronizing voice and images in an online slideshow, for use in sending personal and business messages. They had developed the core technology but only had a clumsy prototype for the tool by which people would author their messages.
The solution
Creating a slideshow involves several steps: assembling the images, recording the voiceover, checking how it came out, circlating the result. The layout of the tool makes the process clear, with as much consistency between the steps as possible.
Goldmail's strategy called for having a free version which would entice new users into buying a paid version, so the design included identifying which functions were necessary to make the free version compelling enough to draw users in, while restricting enough valuable functions to the paid version that it would actually be worth paying for.
Again, I cannot claim credit for the visual look of the solution, as credit for that belongs to the visual designer I collaborated with on the project.
What's cool
The design included tools for captioning images ... structured with deliberate color and placement limitations so that authors could not create ugly slides.
The prototype assumed that authors would define the sequence of their slideshow in advance, and page through the images as they spoke. But since some authors with an improvisational style might change their mind about which image they wanted to use next, in the finished design I made it easy to define the slide sequence either after recording your voice, or during the recording process.
Rafe Needleman at C|Net News said in his review of the product, “I've seen other multimedia presentation products, but never one as drop-dead easy as this.”
Goldmail also became a Cooper case study; it no longer appears on the Cooper website, but a partial archive version remains available.
