This Is Locomotion - Design, Code, and News

We’ve been busy preparing the MediaCore Cloud for launch, and have been looking into how to handle the recurring billing as we plan on offering monthly plans. Initially we were considering building our own recurring payment solution (or implementing one built by a payment gateway), but after some research we found that there are a number of amazing SAAS recurring billing services. Notably, these include:

• Chargify
• Recurly
• Spreedly
• CheddarGetter

In distilling things down further we started by doing a quick search on Quora, and it seemed like most people were either on Chargify or on Recurly. Our good friends over at New Bamboo have used Chargify for Pusher and have never had a problem, and our friends over at MetaLab have been using Recurly for Flow and also have very positive things to say. So both services have passed the social validation check for us.

Digging in a little deeper we found a number of really useful graphs over at Matt Mazur’s blog that essentially showed how the services compared in cost as your subscriber base grows.

The big takeaway here is that Chargify is substantially cheaper early on as they offer lower pricing for your first customers. As the number of customers increases, then the costs of the services roughly equal out.

The next big factor in making a decision on whether to choose Chargify or Recurly boiled down to the feature differences between the two. We’ve drawn up a little feature chart to show off the differences between the two initially.

Let’s go through a couple of the big differences that we see between the two platforms:

Interface Design

There really isn’t much of a comparison here, Recurly wins hands down. Chargify’s interface is considerably less polished, and they really haven’t paid attention to many of the small details that makes Recurly’s interface hyper-useable. As we’re an interface design company, these little things (although not critical to our decision making process) do bear weight on our overall opinion of the service.

Customizeable Emails and Mailing List Integration

Although both systems do dispatch emails, Recurly’s are more user-friendly by default, and are also a lot more customizable. After playing with both platforms, I would prefer to send customer’s emails via Recurly. Another nicety of Recurly is that they also offer mailing list integration, so it’s possible to easily take your subscriber list, and link it up with tools like MailChimp to email blast your subscribers about new features, company news, etc.

Packages / Addons

Using Recurly it is possible to create a Addon (some people might call it a package) that is bundled with a payment in addition to the recurring monthly charge, so if for example you are selling subscriptions to a blogging service, and a customer chooses to add a theme that costs $9, then Recurly will charge the customer their monthly fee, plus the extra $9 for the theme they bought. This is a great feature for anyone who is up-selling subscribers on additional one-time purchases. Note: Chargify does have similar functionality. See the comments by Chargify’s founder.

iPhone App

Chargify really leads the way on this one, providing you with a great iPhone app that gives you all the quick business data you need such as the number of signups you have received that day, the number of customers you have, and your revenue figures. Handy!

VAT Support

Recurly supports charging VAT on items, which will make people who are building SAAS apps in Europe and need recurring billing very happy. Sadly, Chargify does not offer this feature. Note: This feature is coming to Chargify. See the comments by Chargify’s founder.

Intelligent Payment Routing

Recurly has the ability to route payments to the appropriate gateway based on easily configureable rules. This feature can help with avoiding paying unnecessary fees, and can help in unlikely event of a payment failure as it will fallback to the secondary payment gateway if you’ve added one to your account.

Gateway Support

Both Recurly and Chargify offer support for major payment gateways, but they don’t both offer the same ones, so depending on which gateway you want to use one may be a better fit over the other.

Chargify supports:

• Authorize.net
• Beanstream
• PaymentExpress
• QuickPay
• TrustCommerce

Recurly supports:

• Authorize.net
• Beanstream
• Braintree
• Cybersource
• First Data
• Intuit
• Litle & Co.
• Paypal Payflow
• Paypal Website Payments Pro
• Sage Card
• Wirecard

On Paypal w/ Recurly: we tried Recurly with Paypal Website Payments Pro for a recent project, and had nothing but problems with PayPal as we found it dropping around 10% of transactions. Switching from Paypal to Braintree solved the issue, and since  implementing Recurly with Beanstream for a client we haven’t had any issues.

The Card Store

Up until now we’ve been looking at some of the minor differences that separate Recurly from Chargify. Perhaps one of the most major differences between the two services is that Chargify does not keep the card store on it’s server, instead it stores the data with your merchant account of choice. The problem here is that if you decide to switch merchant accounts, you are left in the position of having to persuade your merchant account vendor to release your card store, which they are very reluctant to do in most cases. Recurly keeps the card store on it’s own servers, so if you decide to switch merchant accounts for any reason (ie. to get a better rate) then you don’t need to worry about switching and getting your data since Recurly holds the information. You can read more about this on Chris Compton’s blog here (the article was written before Recurly re-designed their service, but the core point still applies.)

Final Thoughts

After some careful consideration, we’re close to deciding finally on choosing (drumroll…) Recurly as our subscription billing platform of choice. The main factors affecting this decision include:

• The Card Store: The fact that Chargify does not keep the card store
• Payment Routing Support: Recurly’s intelligent payment routing support (although we don’t need this feature now, it’s definitely something we may need to use in the future)
• Number of payment gateway choices: As our service grows, it’s nice to have a broader range of payment gateway vendors to choose from, especially since switching gateways in Recurly is relatively straight forward.
• Interface design: We really do like the interface that Recurly offers over the interface that comes built into Chargify.
• API ease of implementation: We’ve taken an in depth look into both Recurly and Chargify’s API’s. On the whole, Recurly’s documentation is better, and flexibility of their API is superior.

We’ll be looking forward to providing an update on our findings in a couple of months. If anyone else has further remarks on the differences between the two services we’d love to hear them!

The Commonwealth Club Podcast is a new bi-weekly podcast featuring our own Stuart Bowness.

commonwealthclub.tv:

A fortnightly tech podcast from Charlie Cooke, Aidan Hornsby and Stuart Bowness. Three twenty-something guys from various parts of the non-American English speaking world who share an interest in technology, video and design which ranges from the accessible to the downright nerdy have a chat every two weeks and put it up on the internet for all to share. Often ranges into other topics, from the sublime to the ridiculous. A particular fascination with killing mosquitoes predominatess.

In the second episode, The North Carolina Legal Farm, Charlie, Aidan, Stuart and guest Keith Dewey discuss a variety of topics including the iPhone 5, shipping containers, the royal wedding and Apple’s upcoming YouTube killer. You can learn more at commonwealthclub.tv, subscribe on iTunes and follow them on twitter @commonwealthpod.

On Saturday, April 30, 2011 at 10pm EDT (GMT -4), we will begin migrations to a newly provisioned host server. There will be some downtime while your VPS is migrating. We generally do not expect the downtime to exceed 15 minutes, but it is based on many variables and may (rarely) exceed a half hour. The MST will be actively monitoring your host machine for the duration of the migration. If you have any questions, please contact us.

We just finished watching John Gruber’s fascinating chat about The Gap Theory of UI Design. The talk highlights the evolution of the visual design of Mac OS X from System 1 to System 2, all the way up to Mac OS X.

There are lots of great bits of food for thought in the talk, but one that hit us was how Apple has really changed it’s position on interface design over the years. It’s hard to believe that in 12 years, Apple literally changed nothing about how Notepad works. Certainly, some things are tried and true classics, but it’s hilarious to think that Twitter (or Tweetie) for the Mac years ago would have resulted in Twitter being shunned from WWDC. The idea that all apps have to be visually consistent has been dead for some time, and although many apps still utilize similar functionality (such as position of maximize, minimize, scrollbar etc.) they take visual liberties in how they implement these actions.

Consistency isn’t dead. What’s dead is uniformity. ~ John Gruber

Towards the end of the video, Gruber goes on to talk specifically about how The HIG (human interface guideline published by Apple) has become less of a Bible (as it was in the 90′s and early 2000′s), and more of a general guideline for designers and developers.

One of the biggest things we pulled from this talk was the importance of providing guidelines for interface design, without becoming overly structured in the approach to the point where the guidebook literally hampers creativity.

If you’ve got 40 minutes, it’s well worth watching.

You can watch the video on Vimeo. Unfortunately, it can’t be embedded.

Exciting things have been happening at Simple Station for the past few months, and we thought that we should take a little time to update our website and share some of our latest creations.

What’s new and happening?

• The very shiny new Simple Station website
• Completely overhauling our MediaCore Video Platform giving it a complete visual facelift, along with some hefty new features. Our design team has sweated blood on this project, and we’re so excited to see it go live. MediaCore has been getting some great press recently and big organizations such as the University of London have started using it
• Designed and built 6 great new web apps over the past few months. Head over to our portfolio to have a peek at our new work. You can click the little “i” at the bottom of our portfolio (best viewed in Safari for maximum HTML5 coolness) to read a little more about the project and the work that we’ve done
• Amazing new icon design work – just go through the portfolio and you’ll see

We’re hiring!

• We’re also ramping up our staff for the summer and are actively looking for a Python developer. If you’re awesome and want to work for a great up and coming company, get in touch with us

This year we’ve got some pretty huge things planned and we can’t wait to start really making a big splash.

A few choice words on the importance of reducing clutter from the master of marketing, Seth Godin:

Digital media expands. It’s not like paper, it can get bigger.

As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it’s free.

One more link, one more banner, one more side deal on the Groupon page.

Economics tells us that the right thing to do is run the factory until the last item produced is being sold at marginal cost. In other words, keep adding until it doesn’t work any more.

In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.

And it’s hard to go backward.

More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.

Here’s a brief synopsis on the art form known as the Zen of Python. We’re increasingly finding this meaningful on our MediaCore project, and thought we’d share it with our readers.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

I just finished reading the latest edition of Jacob Nielsen’s alertbox covering email newsletter usability. As many of our clientele have email subscriber lists we thought we’d comb through his tips and pull together a few key points and tips.

Key Points / Tips:

1. The number of new or unread emails in an average inbox is 300% higher than it was 4 years ago
2. The title of your email needs to be attention grabbing, and straight to the point, not abstract
3. Put the most important information first, the first paragraph is crucial as it may be the only one that your readers look at
4. The most important information should be the information that is important to your client, not to you
5. Newsletter subscribers are more important than Facebook/twitter followers, treat emails with respect and don’t spam subscribers
6. People are more likely to want to receive updates via an email newsletter than a facebook or twitter post
7. Making your newsletter mobile friendly is important as many users browse newsletters on their mobile devices
8. Users are hesitant to click on videos within emails
9. 50% of users said email marketing influenced their B2B purchases when timing was right
10. View email newsletters as a long term investment

The full article is well worth a read, and provides a much more in depth look at the key points I’ve summarized above.

I just finished reading Stefan Sagmeister’s book titled “Things I have learned in my life thus far” and found this beautiful clip today on Vimeo that expresses what I really feel the essence of this book is about. Experiences.

Taking time out of your life for experiential moments (a little wanderlust) as a designer is one of the best things you can do to continue to nurture your creativity. Many of the best projects I have ever worked on have happened just after a period where I’ve had a complete break from the internet world. Steffan Sagmeister took an entire year to do it, but I believe it can be done anytime you set your mind to it, even if it’s just for a few hours a day.

Wanderlust from Thinklab on Vimeo.

I just finished reading an article by Paul Graham (founder of  Viaweb aka. Yahoo! Store) on the downfall of Yahoo, and how it went from being one of the brightest lights on the Internet to a company that has now been declining in power and influence for years.

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.

What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.

Read the full article on What happened to Yahoo.

Perhaps his biggest pointer for technology startups is that they can’t afford not to have a hacker centric culture, which in his opinion is one of the many factors that had an important part to play in the downfall of Yahoo. For anyone interested in technology (or the tech business in general), his article is definitely a must-read.