Fuel Collective

I’d like to talk a little about making Permute and what the process was like. Why Permute? I think it has been by far our best executed application in terms of both design and functionality. We did a lot of things right and learned quite a lot in the process. What was different about Permute from the others? We had a much more clear vision, we went to the people, and we had experience.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted Permute to be a video converting app, but what would make it different from the others? Why would Permute be worth paying for? It clicked, simplicity! So to get a better idea of what was wrong with the current market of video apps, we setup a survey and asked people a few questions, mainly “What do you hate about current video converting apps”. As you may have guessed, most said “confusing controls”, “hard to use”, etc.

From that alone we learned two really important things. One, people are usually pretty enthused to take a survey and have their opinion listened to. Two, we knew what Permute had to be: Easy to use, naturally good looking, and pleasing to the eye. So we had a clear vision of what Permute would be and I set off in Photoshop to create what would become the interface for Permute.

This was the first time I had ever used Photoshop to create a full mockup of one of our apps. Usually I just put out a few good ideas and we go from there. This time, everything you see in the app was mocked up first in Photoshop to get an idea of A. How should it look and B. How it might function. This was very important if we were going to keep Permute easy to use.

So once we had an app that we fell in love with using, we have learned the hard way in the past that a 1.0 is never as good as you think it’s going to be. So this time we decided to have a private beta of about 50 users. The feedback and ideas that we had gotten from everyone was so amazing and helpful. With that we had a really solid and stable 1.0 release that everyone could enjoy using without any major problems.

So as we learn from successes, we will continue to build on them and keep offering new updates to our apps that will make them even more amazing. I’m excited to see what we can do in 2010 and I hope all our uses will stay with us to enjoy great new things.

Stephen Korecky
CEO & Designer