by derek

What's different in this picture?

Published April 02, 2008 in .

We’ve used Scout for several months internally. Along with Colloquy, Google Docs, Basecamp, and Skitch, it’s one of the few apps I use every day.

We think this makes Scout a better service – we’re not watching Scout from a third-person perspective. However, sometimes things sneak through – the type of things that don’t bother you after using an application for months but can be hurdle to others when getting started.

There were 2 nagging issues that stood out in the Scout user experience. I’ll cover how I addressed the first one here.

With Scout, you have a client that is installed on a server. The client has many plugins, which do things like monitor a URL or the load on the server.

Here’s the top of the client detail page:

…and the top of the plugin detail page:

The pages are so similar, it’s difficult to tell you changed views. Compare the previous image with the new plugin detail view:

It’s easy to blindly follow a site design blueprint and try to make every page fit the same style guidelines. I did a little too much of that in our initial release, but I think this makes the distinction between the two views much clearer without sacrificing a clean look-and-feel.