About us.

Over the last 10 years, Something Interesting has built websites and apps for some of the biggest names in the UK. With a keen eye for userbility and interface design, we are progressively building our client base and reputation.

We are now looking for a talented and passionate designer to come on board and help grow on the great foundations we have built.

What we do.

We build websites, web apps and iOS / Mac apps both for our clients and also ourselves. Some of our clients include The Co-operative Financial Services and Planefinder.net amongst others. Our own apps include TrackRecord & DropIn.

We operate from a small, friendly office in Southsea, Portsmouth.

All the normal software is used and we are a completely Mac based office.

About you.

We need a designer with passion and proven ability, someone who can really push their beliefs and passions. And who will ensure that everything we put out, from full web apps to the smallest icons, is of the best possible quality.

You will also be able to work as the lead designer in a team of developers, you will need to be flexible but strong.

Key skills.

• Strong understanding of usability and UI/UX principles for web & mobile apps.
• Comfortable leading the design side of a project from brief to completion.
• Passion for great design and ability to push for excellent design standards in everything you produce.
• Some basic understanding of HTML, CSS etc would be useful.
• Experienced of working with developers to get the best results.

What we can offer you.

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting projects, some in-house, some client-based.
• Relaxed dress code.
• Occasional hack days and time allocated to your own projects or ideas.
• A competitive salary with bonuses

To apply for this role please send your CV and some examples of your previous work to us.

Photography students from Portsmouth University will be holding an exhibition of their work at the Round Tower in Old Portsmouth on 7th and 8th of December. Something Interesting is happy to be helping sponsor the event.

2nd year Photography students at the University of Portsmouth have been exploring the concept of ‘Territory’ and a group of us will be exhibiting our work at the historic Round Tower in Old Portsmouth.

As part of a 3 year Honours Degree course, this group of 10 students, calling themselves “10 Degrees South”, has come together from around Europe to show their wide-ranging interpretations of this exciting concept – from local landscapes to military campaigns, from nature reserves to wine bars to football supporters.

You can find out more on their website.

Since 2001 we have been designing and building websites for a wide range of clients including The Co-operative Financial Services, Planefinder.net and Coverbox. Working from a close-knit lively studio in Southsea (near Portsmouth), we take a highly collaborative approach to our work, with everyone getting involved throughout the whole research, design and build process.

Recently we have started taking on new, exciting projects and we now need a talented PHP developer to come along and get involved with our current and future clients.

What we need from you

• Previous commercial experience in website development.
• A pragmatic candidate capable of seeing a project from specification through to deployment. Someone who values code standards and takes pride in every aspect of development.
• You will be expected to have extensive knowledge of  PHP, MySQL and XML webservices. As well as being comfortable in the following front-end technologies:  XHTML, CSS, JS.
• We like personalities! You will be dealing with our clients from day one so we need someone who can eloquently explain their reasons for doing things.
• We use a lot of different technologies, all in a Mac based office. You will need to be able to throw your hand at different languages over time.

What we can offer you

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting projects, some in-house, some client-based.
• Relaxed dress code.
• Occasional hack days and time allocated to your own projects or ideas.

Application

Please send you CV through to us (previous work examples preferred) and tell us why you think you’d be perfect for the role.

Just a quick update…

We’ve been working hard on the latest update to TrackRecord (our Basecamp time tracking app) which we are going to be launching on the 15th June. This update will include big changes to the UI, better system preferences and we’ve fixed a number of bugs. We know it has been a while since the last update and hope its been worth the wait.

There are of course more updates planned for the future and if you have any comments or suggestions please do let us know.

Please note that the price is going to increase on the 15th June for new licences, existing licences will be able to upgrade for free.

More updates available on the TrackRecord site and via Twitter.

Today sees the launch of our brand new app, DropIn, which is available on the Mac App Store.

You can follow what we’re doing on Twitter or on the DropIn Website.

About DropIn App

We created DropIn for the same reasons we built TrackRecord because we needed it during our working day. We use Dropbox a lot, we share files with customers and we can have hundreds of updates during any one day. When you leave your computer for a while and come back to Dropbox it is sometimes difficult finding out what has happened and changed in the hours you’ve been away in a meeting.

We also found it difficult focusing on the files and folders which we were looking for updates on.

DropIn solves these problems. It provides a clear and easy to view list of changes (up to the last 100) and clearly shows what has happend to each of these files – showing whether they have been added, deleted or moved.

Filters

By adding filters we can easily hide files or folders which we aren’t that interested in. This is incredibly useful when you are actively working out of a folder, making constant changes to it. By filtering out this folder, Growl notifications are a lot cleaner.

Filtering also comes in handy when you are looking for a specific client response to a file or folder. By filtering everything other than this folder, we are only notified when important files appear.

Inline Preview

Inline previews give you a quick snapshot of the file so you can see key information. This can include a preview image, file size, duration (video and mp3), resolution etc. You can use this screen to either open the file directly (using the system default for file type) or reveal the file in finder – showing exactly where the file exists in your Dropbox folder.

Notifications

You can choose how you want to be notified of updates to your Dropbox folder. This can include sound and Growl alerts, for All, New or Removed files.

A simple System Menu notification will also show you that a file has been added. When you look through the list of file changes, the latest (unviewed) files will appear in bold

This subtle visual change keeps the UI light and user-friendly.

Droplets

Personally my favourite part of the app! By entering your Dropbox User Id, you can quickly and easily drop new files on a single public directory by dropping the file directly on to the DropIn icon on the System Menu.

By doing this you automatically copy a public access URL to your clipboard ready to email to your client, friend etc.

I believe that Droplets will save countless people a great deal of time.

More information

DropIn is available in the Apple Mac Store now.

You can also keep up to date with what we’re doing on the DropIn Website and by following us on Twitter.

Over the last 12 months we have been working with The Co-operative Insurance on their brand new car insurance product – Young Driver Insurance.

About the project

Working closely with our partner Wunelli and a number of different companies, Something Interesting designed, built and integrated the entire quote engine and dashboard for The Co-operative. We now continue to manage the websites and provide ongoing enhancements.

Car Insurance Quote Engine

The Co-operative Insurance wanted to redefine car insurance, especially for the younger driver. The cost of insurance for younger drivers is becoming more and more expensive. And its unlikely that the recent EU ruling on gender discrimination in car insurance is going to help matters.

By rewarding the safer driver with discounts mid-term and at renewal, The Co-operative Insurance hope to engage with the younger audience at the outset. This required some fundamental changes to the standard question set. Because of these changes, we spent a great deal of time working on the customer journey ensuring that the user experience was logical and led the customer through the journey smoothly.

From the price page onwards, the journey diverges from the standard approach. We needed to get the customer to understand the product and, importantly that a GPS system would be installed to measure the customer’s driving style.

All of this had to tie in with current underwriting rules and provide customers with clear & easy to understand messages. Because of this, we included validation and error messages in the web layer, providing simple explanations instead of insurance speak message.

Customer Driving Dashboard

As customers are rewarded for driving more safely, we needed a way of demonstrating the customer’s driving style back to them. This is where Driving Dashboard comes in.

Driving Dashboard shows the customer key driving style metrics over both the policy term and also a 45 day snapshot. The 45 day reports allow the customers to get a quick feel as to whether their driving style is improving, meaning that they will be rewarded for their better driving.

Along with these reports, we included a detailed alerts system, allowing dynamic messages and alerts to be sent to the customer’s driving dashboard based on pre-defined criteria.

This keeps communication between The Co-operative Insurance and their customers to the fore. Not many car insurance policies come with this level of communication about the current policy.

Administration Tasks

With a non-standard car insurance policy, new administration systems are required to fill the holes left by the standard policy administration systems.

Something Interesting established the short fall in current policy administration systems and provided a detailed and workable solution that integrates smoothly with the existing back office support systems. This allows The Co-operative Insurance to administer these policies as easily as their traditional policies.

Working with Something Interesting

By providing a highly motivated and experienced team of developers for this project, we were able to get the whole project to market quickly. This is something that may not have been so easy to do using an in-house development team that have other pulls on their resources.

Because our entire team (designers, developers, project managers etc) work from the same location, communication is quick and clear. A project of this nature is likely to take a number of detours from the original project path as the project matures. By having our team available we are able to quickly change direction – with everyone kept up to date with movements in the project.

The Co-operative Insurance also needed to be satisfied that we would be diligent with the development, especially from a data security point of view. Working closely with their team on due diligence, we were able to meet their exceptionally high standards for security.

Something Interesting is now working towards obtaining the ISO270001 standard.

For more information about our services, contact Steve on 023 928 3725.

From December 2012, car insurance companies throughout the EU will be unable to use gender as a rateable question when selling car insurance policies.

This ruling will inevitably mean that young female drivers will see their premiums increase, as it’s unlikely that these companies will lower the premiums for young male drivers.

Having worked on a couple of car insurance sites, I feel I have a reasonably good understanding of how these sites and companies work. Which is why I am really disappointed in this ruling.

Statistics

I am sure that over the years, insurance companies have been heavily researching the risks and the claims they have received. All of this data must have been put through countless databases and through the hands of hundreds of statisticians. And they continue to review their claims on a daily basis.

So, after all these people have used all these tools at their disposal to crunch all of this data, it is STATISTICALLY more likely that a young male driver will make a claim than a young female driver would. And this is coming from someone who was once a young male driver and paid these premiums.

A level playing field

So, in their quest to create a level playing field, the EU have made things worse for 50% of those people taking out car insurance policies. Won’t this potentially lead to more fronting or more people just not insuring their cars?

If it is a statistical proof that some people are more of a risk, then these people should pay the higher premium.

It is the statistics that make the playing field level.

Eli Pariser gives a remarkable talk to a TED audience on a phenomenon he calls ‘filter bubbles‘.

The concept of filter bubbles dictates that Internet audiences are the subjects of continual contextual bias. Pariser suggests that everything from search engine results to Facebook news feeds have become algorithmically tailored to suit the individual. The problem, he states, is that the concept of the individual is no longer based on salient criteria but by subtle and subconscious means that we have no control over.

The talk features a study undertaken by Netflix engineers who wanted to know why certain types of films were requested and subsequently managed to move up through a users queue more quickly than others. Their findings suggested that people would often add intellectually stimulating films to their queue in order to fulfil future, long-term aspirational goals, but would ultimately choose more entertaining films to watch in the short term.

Research into this sector is incredibly interesting to us as web developers. It helps us to gather a sense of where our industry is moving and how it will look when it finally gets there. As developers, we see targeted advertising as an exercise in algorithmic filtering. As consumers, we largely pass off effective advertising as a happy coincidence. The average user gives little thought or credence to the idea that a particular advert appearing at a particular time is in any way a premeditated or informed decision.

As a society we are becoming increasingly invested in the Internet. We live in a world where news stories break on Twitter before the television. Where Wikileaks has continually beaten traditional press to the punch. For many these outlets champion the Internet as a utopian ideal, a place that affords us an unparalleled freedom of expression. But what we are seeing lately is an increasing effort by the commercial sector to restrict and filter this information. One only has to look towards issues of net neutrality and privacy debates to see that the geography of our digital landscape is slowly shifting. The question is whether this is for better or worse.

We’ve had a busy six months, working on some very large and complex sites. Although this has been good, the team have all been working on different projects individually with little overlap.

The time had come for us to do something different and get our teeth in to a project we can all work on. So, today we started on our first ever hack day.

What is a hack day

In essence, a Hack Day is where a team of developers get together and all work on a project for one or two days. Ideally at the end you should have a working product.

Each of the developers within Something Interesting has their own section of the project to work on with everything (hopefully) coming together at the end of the day.

What are we working on?

Yesterday we did the setup work, buying a domain name, setting up hosting and SVN etc.

We also came up with the concept and discussed how it would work and any potential pitfalls. The concept is quite complex with a lot of unknowns which we will need to get past.

Right now we are working on the database set up, writing code to do the caching of responses and configuring the connection to the Last.fm API.

Update – 11:30

Logo Concept Agreed

After a few different variants we’ve come up with a concept for the logo which we are going to use.

This will be refined later in the day.

Update – 15:51

Just over an hour to go and its starting to look like this is going to be a bigger challenge that we first thought. So far we have:

Written scripts to create images on the fly.
Hooked in to the Last.fm API and retrieved and cached data successfully.
Built the database.
Created design for simple, functional homepage (below).
Coded up front end functionality.
Changed our minds on the logo concept we agreed on 3 hours ago.

Update – 17:30

Close, so very close, but not good enough to release just yet. We’ve got all the functionality working and most of the hard work done. Just couldn’t quite get it to a polished enough state to be released.

We have learnt some good lessons though, especially that swift and agile development is easy if everyone involved knows what they are doing and has an equal distribution of work. Ultimately on a project like this, you can only go as fast as the slowest wheel. And some of the parts of this project just took too much time to complete by one person and couldn’t be easily shared to another person.

If you run a web agency and haven’t tried this before I would recommend it. It teaches you a lot and gives you a great insight in to how the team work. It also gives your team something interesting to work on… which, lets face it, everyone needs sometimes.

We will send an update when we launch it on Twitter . Would love to know your thoughts and feedback.

Steve

On top of a unhealthy supply of tea and coffee, we’ve recently become hooked on bubble gum.

So, to stop annoying the guys in the local shop, we decided to buy a whole box of them…. lets see how long this lasts.