Case Study:

Challenge: Introduce the concept of "vook" to the world

Vook came to Grio with a big ambition: to merge the worlds of videos and books together into a new type of media called a "vook". The idea was to intersperse videos throughout the text of a book. The reading experience needed to flow seamlessly while the videos supplimented the text. The vook player needed to be attractive yet simple in order to compliment a wide range of genres including cookbooks, fitness journals, novellas, and others.

Adding to the challenge was a hard deadline. Vook needed to launch the application on 10/1/2009, meaning there were only three months to design, develop and test a new vook player and ecommerce system and deliver them to the world. Adding to the pressure was media blitz initiated by Vooks marketing wing.

Solution: Rapid development

Grio leveraged an Agile development methodology called Scrum in order to keep the project on track and to structure frequent communication with Vook's business proponents.

Grio created wireframes and mockups early on in the project while the foundations of the vook player were being created. The application needed to be intuitive to use. Even though videos and literature had never been merged in this way, users should not feel a "learning curve". In team-like fashion, Grio and Vook iterated on the application designs, eventually honing in on the design being used by consumers today.

On the technology side, Flex/Actionscript was selected as the programming language because of its mature API and cross-browser compatibility. Adobe's recently released Text Layout Framework (TLF) was chosen because of it's flexibility - the player would need to support a wide variety of styles and layouts. For the ecommerce framework and server side, Grio used a LAMP application framework.

After the UX and core architecture, next steps were to design the look of the application, build out the remaining functionality, and apply the skin. Grio worked closely with Vook to define a design that would appeal to a mainstream audience. Time was spent planning the transitions and views between pages and views, as it was felt that this was core to a good experience and would help make the application "pop". Grio leveraged the new transition API that came packaged with the Flex4 framework in order to make these plans a reality.

As work on the ecommerce site progressed, Grio started to build out the application infrastructure in preparation for launch. Amazon's EC2 was selected for hosting, and several environments (qa, staging, production) were created in order to help with the application rollout. The application was thoroughly QA'ed and finishing touches were added. Before long Jira was looking pretty empty - the only tasks were deployment-related!

In order to ensure a stable environment, Grio load tested the application, probing for weaknesses. After making some modifications to the Apache and Mysql, the numbers looked good. Final touches included setting up a website monitoring service and backing up the database to Amazon's S3. Reports were put in place so that Vook's marketing and sales teams could receive up-to-date conversion information.

On launch day, the system responded admirably despite press releases on the NYT business home page and other major outlets. Because of extensive load testing and QA, the launch went off without a hitch, and no problems have been encountered to date.

Results:

Grio delivered a total solution for Vook including design, user flows and navigation design, application architecture and development, QA, infrastructure setup, deployments, and post-launch support.

The Vook project required creativity and flexibility, as well as the ability to identify appropriate technologies and implement them in a timely manner.