Yellowlane by Josh Williams

Stephen F

Now that the Blinksale news is out of the bag, I have some more news to share. Alamofire, our digital collectibles company that is going to change the world (for real), is packing up our Southlake studio and moving south to Austin. Yay!

I can’t tell you how excited we are about the move. We’ll be opening our Austin studio in about a month, and we can’t wait to expand our eating options around downtown and SoCo.

Austin is a terribly attractive city to us as we continue work on Gowalla. It’s not too large, has a strong urban core, an outdoor-friendly vibe, and a ton of super-interesting places to visit. In fact, I don’t think we could find a better city to develop Gowalla in. We’re stoked.

Of course, this will also cut down on hotel bills during SXSW and ACL. This is going to be so much fun. See you there!

Building a Better Blinksale

In 2001 I started a design company in my Illinois apartment’s second bedroom called Pure Imagination Studios. After getting married and moving to Texas, we renamed the company Firewheel. A few years into the adventure Iconmaster and Etherbrian joined the team and Firewheel’s reputation for premium quality icon and interface design grew. Little did I know we were just getting started.

In 2005 we branched out from client work and launched an invoicing service called Blinksale. At the time, Blinksale was praised for its unconventional design and ease of use. Our goal was to make invoicing fun, and on several levels I believe we succeeded. Over the 2 years that followed we continued to improve and grow the service to the point that it was providing a substantial portion of Firewheel’s revenue (we continued to do client work as well). Blinksale was loved and cherished by its customers, and we had a growing lists of things we wanted to do with the service.

Then we were blindsided.

18 months ago the team behind Firewheel started a new game company called Alamofire. For the curious, the firewheel and the alamofire are both wildflowers native to our home state of Texas. Alamofire was birthed out of another Firewheel side-project you may remember called IconBuffet. IconBuffet was a stock icon trading community. Oddly we found that our icons were rarely used for practical purposes. They were simply collected. So we decided to take what we’d learned and start a game company. Unfortunately as Alamofire grew, our ability to devote time to Blinksale diminished.

While thousands continue to use Blinksale for their invoicing, we’ve been unable to support the community in the way we would have preferred. Our wishlist of features has grown, but has not been attended to. Many of you have shared your ideas with us, as well as your love for Blinksale, and it has pained us to not spend more time investing in the service.

My hope has always been that we’d be able to find a quality team worthy to carry the Blinksale baton.

Today I’m pleased to announce that the Blinksale baton has been passed onto the uber-talented Brian Oberkirch, Brandon Cotter and their newly formed team at Doublewide Labs. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this.

Brian was one of the earliest paid subscribers at Blinksale, and it only seems fitting that someone who loves the service as much as him be the one to take over the reins. Brandon is one of the savviest tech entrepreneurs I know, and his vision is certain to take Blinksale to places I could have never imagined. And I’ll be hanging around the edges just a bit to help them during the transition and to offer my two cents from time to time.

And since some are bound to inquire, yes Blinksale was acquired. No, we’re not going to disclose details. Everyone is happy.

To help slingshot Blinksale on its way, the new team would like to gather feedback and ideas from current, past (and perhaps future) customers. Of course, we’ve passed along all of the feedback we’ve received in the past that we haven’t acted on. But the new team would love to hear directly from you as well. Where can Blinksale be improved? What could make invoicing easier for you? How can Blinksale make your life more fun?

You can join the discussion at Get Satisfaction, you can follow Blinksale on Twitter, and you can check up on the Blinksale blog for the latest direct from the new team.

Collectively we’re thrilled about the future of Blinksale. A big thanks goes out to all of our subscribers‚Äîespecially to those who have waited patiently for this next stage of Blinksale’s life.

So what’s next for me and my team at Alamofire? Tune in tomorrow for some exciting (at least to us) news. We’ll let Blinksale bask in the glory today.

A Better American?

Earlier today Dustin Curtis posted a redesign exercise of American Airlines’ website. Like Dustin I’m not exactly a fan of American’s experience. But since I live in Dallas/Fort Worth and fly a good bit, I use the site a lot. I was definitely curious to see Dustin’s work.

While the hypothetical redesign is certainly balanced, clean, and easy on the eyes, the liberty is taken in his post to publicly throw AA’s design team under the bus, eroding much of his argument.

While I’m certainly not the authority on this, AA.com is built with software created by Sabre, an American Airlines-incubated company. Sabre provides reservations and booking software to pretty much the entire airline industry worldwide. Some of this code is likely as old as the Grand Canyon. As such, design changes on a site as large, complex and technologically-dated as AA.com are a whole lot more difficult than designing a single homepage, posting a PNG and writing a rant.

Suggesting that simply replacing AA’s designers with a “totally competent team” will solve the problem is bogus. Doug Bowman is likely the most competent designer I know, and he wasn’t given the wings he needed to fly at Google. Should we blame Doug for Google’s design faults?

For what its worth, AA.com did in-fact update their rewards reservation system last week.¬†Unless you’ve booked a ticket using miles in the last few days, you’ve not seen this. It’s by no means perfect, but its a step in the right direction. If the design team at AA can continue to thoughtfully implement change like this, the site will improve over time. Steering a ship this large takes an enormous amount of patience. It’s certainly patience that I do not possess.

Finally, American Airlines services a ton of everyday people. Not web savvy people, but people like my mom and dad. They get used to the way a site works, warts and all. Moving the cheese for folks like that can be a tricky chore resulting in more harm than good. That’s why AA is smart to implement small changes bit by bit.

Redesign efforts like Dustin’s help bring awareness to how an experience can be improved. 37signals made these exercises famous with projects like 37BetterFedex that showed point-by-point how they would improve the experience. They made their point, detailed their improvements, and left emotion at the door.

I’d love to see more of Dustin’s work, but I’d prefer it not come at someone else’s unwarranted expense. That’s all.