SeriousBox narrowcasting front-end CMS

The person editing tomorrow’s playlist runs a café. They are doing it late, once, between other things, and they will not be back for a fortnight. Whatever they were shown last time, they have forgotten. That is the whole design brief for this one.

The playlist editor

Three columns, holding the footage, ordered left to right in the direction the material actually travels. The complexity is real, so the answer was to lay it out rather than to hide it behind steps.

There is no save button. Every change is saved as it is made. A save button is a promise that someone will remember to press it, and a café owner at midnight will not. It also removes the worst outcome, which is not a mistake but a lost evening’s work.

The SMS tools got the same treatment: laid out plainly, with the basic but vital information where it can be found rather than where it fits.

Target Marketing

Venues wanted to know who was actually in the room, so they started collecting mobile numbers. A guest takes part in the SMS service, at the least to get the free newsletter, and from there the venue can send information or run lotteries in bulk.

Target Marketing took that further, into a conversation rather than a broadcast. The guest requests a URL and a PIN by SMS and logs in to a mobile site. The venue controls what is shown and what is asked. What comes back tells them who their guests are, well enough to plan an evening around them.

It is worth noting what that is, underneath: a venue with a screen, a phone number and a question is running a small piece of user research, and the answers go straight into what they put on the screen next.

What it was built from

Smarty templates, PHP, MySQL and HTML, over a good many APIs and libraries.

It is one part of a larger system, described on the narrowcasting application page.