Image annotation tool
I wanted to create a tool which allowed me to easily gather feedback on images/designs/wireframes online (opposed to sending off a document to someone). So I've put together a tool which is a lot like doing image annotations on Flickr. The idea is you upload your wireframe or whatever, send the link to people and they add notes commenting on the image.
If you find any bugs, want extra features adding (e.g. adding some copy/paste code so you can embed this in your site), leave a comment below and I'll see what I can do.
Back story
A few months ago I was in the pub explaining to a friend an idea I had for a web app. Now this idea wasn't particularly innovative, revolutionary or good; but after awhile it was decided that the only way to decide if the idea was going to be useful to people was to do some research.
So off I went to do some research. Being a good market researcher type I decided to conduct a survey. After much writing, typing and cursing I eventually got my simple yet beautifully crafted concept test up on a survey monkey type site. I launched the survey and recruited sample via Facebook. Time passed and I checked the data to see what was coming out the other end... I was a bit disappointed. I was getting lots of clickthroughs from Facebook, but I was getting a massive number of drop outs after the first page page or so, leaving me with very little in the way of useful data. So I stopped the recruitment, closed the survey and decided to try and figure out what was going on.
I looked through the survey and I was pretty happy with it. It was no different from any other survey you would see online, apart from the fact it was pretty short (about 20 questions). But it was dull - surveys are kind of dull to take part in. And it's dullness problem was probably amplified by the sample I recruited.
This got me thinking about if there was a more interesting way to gather feedback on web site designs. I've sort of failed in what I wanted to a achieve because this tool won't replace a proper concept test (I'm still going to have to write surveys). You won't get enough information from it and the information probably won't be as directive as you would need. But I reckon it could still be a useful feedback tool either by itself, as part of a survey, maybe some type of pre-task...
Credit's due
Massive thanks has to go to
Chris at flipbit who wrote the jquery plugin for this. For my part I had to integrate the plugin with Drupal which was pretty straightforward. There's already a
image annotation plugin for Drupal which you may want to checkout which means I probably won't push this up to the Drupal CVS as the functionality already exists. I will release the source code and type up some more of the techie stuff in a separate post.
