Vai Rolar released into the wild

After all the design/re-design and redoing that goes into the initial launch of a website my client Vai Rolar are proud to launch their website and begin their business. Vai Rolar is a company providing event information in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They put out a free weekly magazine that is distributed around the city. They also have a website that mirrors the content of their magazine allowing the public to search for various events through out the city. While they are not the first to undertake such an effort in the web space there really is nobody providing a city-wide magazine so they have an interesting combination.

While I had no involvement in the magazine side of their business, they commissioned me to work on the technology side in an effort to create a website that, rather than copied their competition, would instead offer similar information in a way that was more accessible and easier to use. I can’t take credit for the visual design of the site, that was done by a Brazilian company called Freeladesign. They were a great group to work with and had a lot of interesting ideas to contribute to the project. My involvement was on the software development side of things. I designed and built the database and used weborb for php as the middleware between the Adobe® Flex® components on the website and the database. More than just writing the code I tried to offer some new ideas into the user experience of the site that differed quite a bit from Vai Rolar’s competition.

I wrote a case study that outlines some of the usability choices that were made based on my suggestions. I think we made some big advances in the usability of the site and it offers an improved experience over Vai Rolar’s competition.

I’m continuing to work with Vai Rolar to develop their site further. I’d like to eliminate the HTML all together and go with a full screen Flex application. I’ll post more about this as it develops.

tidbit: Vai Rolar means “going to happen” in Portuguese and is used as a sort of slang by young people in certain situations.