Introducing 'Glance'

Most of you will by now be familiar with the statistic that people typically Glance at their mobile phones on average 100 times each day. Any company wanting to connect with its audience has to be able to tune into some of that bandwidth.

Several of us here at Affino are avid users of apps like Yahoo News Digest and The Economist Espresso, so the idea was to create a template along similar lines, but with rather more tightly defined characteristics - hence ’Glance’ was born.

All on One Mobile Screen

The target was that each ’article’ as such would have to fit in its entirety on a single mobile screen. You would be able to read its contents in just a couple of minutes, and then click on a single link destination / Call to Action. There would also be Share Tools for sharing the article to social media.

I then came up with a colour-coded master Topics list of just 12 categories, which everything would need to fit into:

• Affino = General company news, changes to services etc.
• Announcement = Any kind of notice, alert or proclamation, except hosting-related matters which have their own category
• Compassion = Showing sympathy, commiseration, condolences or simply solidarity for a worthy cause
• Digital Business = Matters pertaining to the wider connected world, our immediate technology sector and related disciplines
• Hosting Alert = Any key notifications from the Hosting Centre - warnings of imminent works, as well as alerts for turbulence or other pertinent technical matters
• In Praise of = Rating or Recommending a particular artistic endeavour, activity or event, or simply acknowledgements of good works or valiant deeds
• Inspiration = Anything which inspires us - the arts, nature, human endeavours etc.
• Launch = Any key launch event - typically new site launches but can be any manner of related categories too
• Release = Notifications of Affino version and patch releases, every formally released version will be mentioned here
• Solution = Matters relating to The Affino Unified Digital Business Platform - innovations, additions and deprecations which are either events beyond the scope of the release cycle, or relating to more general matters
• Thought for the Day = Oscar Wilde style smart quips accompanied by equally smart visuals - to help raise spirits - particularly on Mondays
• Tip = A quick business or Affino solution tip that can be communicated with a single picture and in 480 characters or less

I have managed to make use of 8 of those Topics already!

Finally, each of the images used is the same format as we use throughout the site - a square image of max dimensions 700 x 700 px. For ’Glance’ the lower half of the image gets cleverly masked off and covered by the text of the article. This means that when considering ’Glance’ image compositions, the focal part of the image needs to be above the half-way line.

There is a dedicated Glance ’eye’ icon which is the 4th icon from the right in the top navigation - to allow quick and easy access of this page. Even though it is fully optimised for mobile use, it also looks great on desktop.

So ’Glance’ is where you go when you want a quick update on all the key matters relating to Affino (in 480 characters or less). If you have a few minutes spare on your commute or waiting for a taxi - you can scan through a number of these in the briefest of moments.

The actual template consists of just a few custom elements sitting on top of Affino Related Link Articles.

Happy Glancing!