Being all about the user

That phrase is often used and is a fairly obvious statement. Aren’t all applications, web or otherwise, built for the users?

Well yes, but I bet you can name a bunch that don’t feel like they were. Maybe this is one of the reasons apps stay in beta so long now.. which I guess makes sense.. that is what the beta stage is for. isn’t it?

Anyway, I diverge. Pingbase is a very simple tool, it only really does one thing after all. It has an object and list model. In this case only two lists; URLs a user is monitoring and people that receive notifications. Each object in each list has it’s own list of objects associated with it, made up of objects from the other list. So to give you an example, a URL object in the URLs list will have a list of people from the People list assocciated with it. And vice-versa.

So basically the Pingbase interface lets you add and remove objects to and from lists, and then to edit those object’s details. As well as a list of people to notify, a URL object also has the URL itself and a label to identify it. A person object is associated with a list of URLs, a first name and last name, and also holds details for each notification type; email address and mobile phone number.

Simple stuff, probably explained in too detailed a fashion :)

Additionally, there are screens for upgrading or downgrading an account and for tracking previous payments.

The main thing about the interface design is that it has to be one that’s obvious. Pingbase isn’t a tool you’re going to use everyday. It’s a fire-and-forget app. Once you set it up, you may not need to ever come back! The only time you’ll hear from Pingbase is if one of your sites goes down. So after a year of not logging in and using the interface, you should be able to come back and know exactly how to use it without having to learn anything again.

To this end, we’ve tried to only show the options you need on each screen and to emphasise the most used functions. We can’t predict how people will want things done, but we can get closer if we remove controls we don’t think are needed.

Hello world!

Hi!

This blog is here to let you know what’s going down with PingBase, our new website monitoring tool.

We’ll tell you how we’re getting on with the build, and then any thoughts about features and implementation. And when we’re up and running we’ll talk about how you can use PingBase to serve you most effectively.

Of course we’ll also be asking your opinions too, so if there’s something obvious we need to do, or you just have an interesting idea, let us know..