http://blog.stamped.com/

Designing Stamped - A look at the design process, principles and evolution

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:13:55 -0400

A couple weeks ago we posted an in-depth look at our backend engineering, and today we wanted to give a behind-the-scenes tour of the other pillar of our product: design.

We have taken design seriously since day one, and we’re fortunate to have an incredibly talented design team. The designers came on board as some of the first employees, when all we had was an idea and a really jenky HTML5 prototype.

The design team took the vision and turned it into a reality with a systematic and focused approach that produced a completely designed product in six weeks.

Design Evolution

The brand was an important part of the idea from the beginning, so we integrated it into the creative process. We wanted the design to reflect the significance of putting your stamp on your favorite things.

Your personal stamp of approval is the highest-quality signal of value and reflects who you are as a person. When you stamp something, you’re putting your reputation as a tastemaker on the line and using one of your precious stamps.

We spent the early part of the summer of 2011 simultaneously exploring the design of the brand and the user interface. Every few days, we’d print out, pin up, and, as a team, discuss the different treatments in terms of layouts, textures, colors, logos, and typefaces. None of the early designs truly captured the sentiment conceptually until we saw this:

With the user’s face right next to what he’s stamped—both big and bold—it’s as if each user is saying, “I wholeheartedly stand behind this recommendation.” This design aligned with our belief that you are what you like and a stamp is the digital representation of what you like best.

Visually, this design still wasn’t quite right—it was too dark, too heavy, too masculine, uninviting, and hard to read—but it was correct conceptually. We continued to iterate in this direction and refine the design until it ultimately became what you see today.

In the end, the design team produced over twenty different directions in the span of a couple weeks, each building on the previous to become today’s product:

Design Principles

With the core design direction established, we extended it and the brand to the rest of the product based on these design principles:

Elevate the user. Stamped and the app itself are the platform. The users, personalized stamp colors, and content bring the platform to life.
Keep the UX and the visual design simple. Instead of a reductive approach to simplicity—simplify, simplify, simplify—look at it additively. Start with the UI stripped down to its most essential elements, and only ‘style’ it when something is missing.

Stamped takes an offline activity and brings it online to reduce the friction of finding new things and experiences by making it easier and tailoring it to the user. The design is what initially draws users in and guides them through using the product. There are hundreds of great apps available and we think our design team helped Stamped stand out.

If you have specific questions about our process or feedback about our design we want to hear it - feel free to email us at everyone@stamped.com. Check back for more about Stamped in the coming weeks.

- The Stamped Team

The Engineering Behind the Stamped Backend

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:40:21 -0400

As the Stamped platform continues to grow and evolve, we wanted to take an opportunity to share a glimpse into the technology behind our product for all the developers out there interested in learning more about how everything really works.

Our small team of four engineers has logged many hours building a production backend, and the following will explain the various components and how they work together. Currently, the Stamped platform can be broken down at a high level into two major areas: the core Stamped REST API and the Stamped iOS client.

The life of the request:

All requests begin at a client and are routed through Route53’s DNS, then are distributed evenly via an ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) to an API server. Each API server runs its own web stack of Nginx, Gunicorn, Django and our custom python API code.

The Stamped internal API then parses and authenticates each request. The API servers are stateless and depend on our Mongo database to store and retrieve user data, and are responsible for coordinating the creation and enrichment of our data about stampable entities.

Our entities cover a number of verticals from artists to books to restaurants, and we utilize over a dozen third-party services to provide metadata and to enable meaningful actions, such a downloading a song from iTunes. We generate these entities both eagerly and lazily in response to user queries.

To fulfill a request, the python API layer typically performs one or more of the following actions:

Reading from and/or writing to the shared MongoDB replica set
Reading from and/or writing to the shared Memcached cache
Dispatching work to the asynchronous task message broker

Asynchronous tasks are brokered to one of the N worker servers (via Celery)

Writing real-time stats to StatsD on the monitor server
Possibly making one or more calls to external, third-party API’s

Figure 1. Stamped API Backend Architecture

The Stamped REST API is served via a Python codebase hosted on Amazon Web Services. We use a custom Ubuntu AMI as our VM and AWS exclusively as our cloud hosting environment. In Stamped we use a variety of AWS technologies including, but not limited to: EC2, EBS, ELB, S3, SES, Route53, Cloudfront, and Cloudwatch.

There are many ways to structure your stack, but for those who are looking to build their own backend from scratch, these are the design principles on which Stamped was built:

Use the best tools to minimize the scope of the project.
Code for today without crippling tomorrow.
Stability matters when you finish. Productivity matters when you start.
Don’t intentionally break stuff. That’s just dumb.

We love talking about our backend and our stack, so send us an email (everyone@stamped.com) and let us know what you think or if you have any questions. Or if you’re in the NYC area, come talk to us at the many local tech events we attend. Also, check back in a few weeks for more highlights about the technology behind the Stamped platform.

Introducing Stamped 1.1 -- New Maps, More Stamps

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:36:26 -0500

We launched Stamped a couple months ago as the new way to share and discover the best things from only the people you trust. We’ve been excited to see so many people connect with our message, and just recently crossed 100,000 stamps on the platform!

But we’ve also heard some consistent feedback since launch: what if I’m looking for a restaurant or bar in a city where none of my friends have been? And what if I’m looking for something specific, like tacos or sushi?

To address these issues, we decided to overhaul one of our most popular features: the map. And we’re excited to announce the new maps as part of our 1.1 update today, which we think will particularly come in handy for all the stampers at SXSW.

The first major new feature you’ll notice on the map view is a slider at the bottom. Now if you can’t find any stamps from your friends, you can slide to check out stamps from friends of friends as well as the most popular in the community. This means you can always find the best places, no matter where you are.

We also added a search bar with some power behind it to help with specific needs. Try “Pizza in Boston”, or “Fish Tacos.” When you search, you’re not just looking across location and cuisine, but even individual items on the menu. We’ll be rolling out these search improvements over the next week.

We hope these upgrades make Stamped your app of choice at SXSW for discovering the best places in Austin. To help with that effort even more, we’ve partnered with a local pro, The Austin Chronicle, to stamp their favorite Austin restaurants. Try following them — we’ve added them as a suggested user.

For all of our Stamped fans (whether you’re at SXSW or not), we really hope you head over to the App Store now and download this major update. And as always, feel free to send your loving (or hateful) feedback to everyone@stamped.com.

-The Stamped Team

Sending stamps to Twitter/FB: Now more useful

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:26:25 -0500

Today we rolled out an update to the stamp page on the web, so when you send a stamp to Twitter or Facebook, it will now include more information from our database. We hope this helps your friends get the most from your recommendations.

For example, if you stamp a restaurant we will now add location information, a map, and a shortcut to OpenTable if it exists. Here’s one for Boxing Room in San Francisco.

And here’s an example of a stamp for The Artist, which automatically includes the film poster art, rating, synopsis and a link to get the tickets:

With this update, sharing stamps on Twitter and Facebook should be a lot more useful to your friends.

In other news, we just got an N64 and it’s really sweet.

-The Stamped Team

Stamping iOS Apps in v1.0.2

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:41:00 -0500

One of the enhancements in the new Stamped v1.0.2 is full support for iOS apps. We noticed soon after launch that a lot of people wanted to stamp their favorite apps so we added iTunes apps to our database to make it as easy as possible. We also added a new details page specifically for apps so you can view more info and download them:

Fully supporting apps continues our efforts to make Stamped as useful as possible. It’s our goal that every stamp from a friend is automatically enriched with information and ways to go do it. As a reminder, you can already get movie tickets, make reservations, order books, and download songs. Here are some examples:

Restaurants:

Movies:

Books:

Albums:

We hope you enjoy the new support for iOS apps, and as always, feel free to email us at everyone@stamped.com with any ideas, feedback or questions.

-The Stamped Team

Introducing Stamped

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:10:00 -0500

Today, after months of hard work, we’re very excited to announce that Stamped is now available in the App Store. It’s been a fun journey building this product, and we wanted to take a moment to explain why we made it.

We built Stamped because we think social products can be useful, as well as fun. We want Stamped to solve a problem, not just be another app that asks you to share for the sake of sharing.

The problem we’re trying to solve is noise. Specifically, there’s too much of it today when you try to discover something new online, whether it be a restaurant, book, movie, or song. What does 3 stars from 70 strangers mean? Is that good or bad? Can I trust this person’s opinion? Who is he/she? If you’ve ever asked these questions, you’ve experienced the weaknesses of current review and rating sites.

So people turn to their friends for recommendations, because they know they can trust them. They know who their friends are and they know what their recommendations mean. A foodie friend knows great restaurants, for instance, and a film-buff friend knows all the best movies.

But people exchange this incredibly valuable information in a fragmented, inefficient fashion. Long email threads, last-minute calls, mass text messages; these are all ways in which we use our friends to find something great, but the information is often not as usable or ever-lasting as it should be.

We believe that technology can and should make this better. There should be one platform for friends to share and discover what they like best, and it should be simple and fast to use. That’s what we’re building with Stamped.

Every decision we made when building Stamped was designed to make the platform as useful as possible, and to incentivize quality over quantity. If there were places where we could reduce the potential for noise, we tried to do so.

Here are some examples of how that mindset influenced the product:

- Everyone only gets 100 stamps to start, but can earn more if their friends like what they recommend. This makes a stamp valuable, and rewards people who share things that actually help their friends.

- The stamps pane is structured more like an inbox as opposed to a feed. It’s a timeless repository that you can search through, map, or filter by category. It’s designed so that the last 10 shared things aren’t the only things you can find.

- Nearly all stamps are connected to structured data from Google, iTunes, Fandango, and Amazon so you can bring up a map, preview a song, or even go buy a movie ticket.

These kinds of decisions have hopefully added up to make a product that is simple, fast and, most importantly, provides real value to your life. We hope you’ll turn to Stamped when asking yourself “What movie do I see next?” or “What restaurant should I go to tonight?” and discover useful inspiration.

This is our first release, so if you have ideas or suggestions, or just want to send an epic rant, don’t hesitate to email our team directly at everyone@stamped.com.

Now go put your stamp of approval on the world!

(And download the free app at stamped.com/download.)

- The Stamped team

Hello world (almost)...

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:46:20 -0500

We are working on something new, and are getting ready for our launch. Sit tight for an exciting announcement from the Stamped team.