Quality, Usability and Performance

A lot of our focus with Affino is on how to improve everyday tasks for people when communicating and selling online. To the extent that it keeps us awake at night. Most of our energies go into delivering customer projects and rolling out major social and commercial enhancements in Affino, however we’re always looking to improve the core system.

Since starting Comrz we’ve focused on this in two ways, firstly by dealing with bugs and niggles. These are the potholes of the user experience, they’re not a big deal individually, but if they’re not taken care of then the whole user experience becomes degraded and users are continuously tripped up (especially beginners). We are investing a lot of resources into fixing all of these as quickly as possible, most are fixed within 30 days.

The second bigger challenge deals with the more fundamental issues of faster page views, improved compatibility, smarter security, cleaner code, improved user experience and exponential productivity breakthroughs. We always look to tackle at least one significant core project in each release and the upcoming 5.5.15 release is no exception. We’re doing four great projects: Clean Code, Live Editor v4, Simple Media Uploads and Structure Copy.

Clean Code

Chrome does not handle JavaScript well. In fact it’s infuriatingly flaky and intermittently displays the JS code within the page. We had hoped that Google would fix this, but there’s been no improvement for months. This has highlighted to us the need to completely re-factor the way we handle JavaScript and CSS code in Affino.

There are many benefits from extracting all the JavaScript and CSS from the dynamically generated code and placing it in dedicated files and ’on-load’ functions: faster page loads, reduced hosting requirement, cheaper content distribution, fewer browser errors, and improved SEO rankings (because the pages are faster, lighter with higher word count concentrations).

We’ve re-factored completely the way we handle the JS and CSS code in the new release. The biggest impact coming from how we generate the Skins (page design and styling code). Behind the scenes, there is also a greatly improved application structure.

The real benefit comes to users in the form of a faster, better user experience.

Live Editor v4

I’ve already posted separately on the updated Live Editor. The update has turned into a much bigger project than originally anticipated. This is primarily because there is a lot to it, with dozens of input elements. We’re doing a ground-up re-factoring on the Live Editor. The net result will be a much better looking interface, more intuitive, much faster page loads when editing, and no more annoying Chrome issues.

The big win will also come with fewer bugs being introduced through Live Editor updates in the future thanks to much cleaner source code.

Simple Media Uploads 

This has been one of the projects which we’ve been very keen to do for a while, but which has not had any commercial imperative (i.e. no money involved). The current system for uploading media into articles, forum posts etc. is very clunky and disjointed, but it works. The Media Uploader itself is probably the element in Affino which has had the most updates, and which has been the hardest to get right.

Over the long course of developing it, we’ve had many breakthroughs where aspects have improved dramatically, but it’s never gotten to a stage where we’ve been satisfied with it. The upcoming release finally nails all the essentials.

Uploading media into articles is now a fast, seamless process. The media selector pops up pretty much instantly and makes it easy to find and select or upload new media. As soon as the media item has been uploaded it’s automatically selected into the article. Simple and fast. We’ve done lots of usability tweaks for the whole experience and it’s now perfectly usable.

Structure Copy

Structure Copy is one of those ideas which we’ve had on the back-burner for ages. It’s the killer feature for Affiliate Stores, Micro-sites and replicating existing sites.

We’ve always wanted to put in a facility whereby editors can copy one site or content tree to create another instance. In practical terms though, Affino sites can (and do) end up with millions of articles, media items, members, products, settings, profiles etc. a global copy function would most likely simply kill the whole hosting environment the site is running on, if it is large enough. There are also dozens of reasons why you would not want to have such a universal copy function.

The Smart Copy we rolled out for Design Objects, which effectively allows designers to copy page designs wholesale to create new ones has been a massive productivity breakthrough, and we’ve used it as the inspiration for the new Structure Copy capability we’re rolling out.

It will be possible to copy up to 200 Channels and Sections in one go to anywhere on any site. It is very simple to apply new security, workflows, designs and profiles during the transition, and to be selective about which parts of the tree you want to copy. The system also automatically filters out social sections and prevents the creation of duplicate channels, e.g. will only let one Login page exist on a site.

It’s very much a v1 version, but we can see it saving users many hours or even days when setting up spin-off sites.

Ongoing Innovation

We have a whole range of core innovation projects such as those outlined above which we will be rolling out during the course of the year and can’t wait to get started on them.