endorsome

well another day, another piece of creative genius from Sam Brown

have been watching with interest the evolution of Endorse on dribbble these past few weeks. in the words of the man himself, Endorse

will allow you to easily find people in your immediate and extended networks who have availability, and likewise, if you are indeed looking for work allow you to connect with others, promote your skills and hopefully increase your work load

expressing an early interest in the app (by following @endorseapp on twitter) i was able to register an account last night and it looks like a marvellous application. some initial thoughts:

loves

having twitter integration at the sites core is fantastic.
it is amazing to see how this blether tool is now the primary means of communication within the web design community.

The simplicity of the user interface and its functionality is spot on. any action is no more than one click away and login is simply via your twitter account (although an email address is required for registration).

Sam’s eye for design is outstanding.
The black and yellow palette works extraordinarily well and the simple layout provides a firm basis for Sam’s rich attention to detail.
Shading and rounded corners have been used subtly whilst the use of tone and opacity to depict availability works extremely well.
It is also nice to see the site liberally sprinkled with CSS3 and jQuery enhancements. This is a site unapologetically designed for the rich browsers of the web community.

I must also mention the comedic touch of the site’s 404 page

suggestions

With the site design employing the latest innovations in CSS3 it would have been nice to see it also built in HTML 5.
Extending the CSS3 support to Opera (and the W3C specs) would also have been nice additions.
Whilst aimed at a web savvy audience some basic fallback styling to IE 6 (for example via Andy Clarke‘s universal IE6 stylesheet) would also have been nice.

The search facility at present only applies to your extended community. Whilst this supports the ethos behind Endorse (“We search through your social connections to determine the most personal recommendations”), this makes it extremely difficult to search for endorsements when your own networks are quite small (hint hint) :(
This is the one area where the site might be prone to accusations of social media circle jerk symposium, however unjustified.

Another observation is that on a users page it isn’t wholly clear who is endorsing who. On Sam’s page for example is he endorsing all these fine people or they him?

However, this all shouldn’t distract from a fantastic application.
Sam and Mike have laboured away to provide one of those rare sites that is instantly both invaluable and effortless at the same time.

Now, anbybody care to endorse me?

Comments

Hey Cole, great feedback. Thanks for taking the time to write a post.

I would have loved to have built it in HTML5 but from concept to completion this was done in only a few weeks, completely in our spare time. I did what I knew best and fastest.

We don’t support IE6, that’s not just a decision based on style but functionality as well. Our target market doesn’t require it and we’ve had almost no IE6 visitors anyway. Additional CSS3 support is forthcoming.

Search, I agree. It would be great to be able to search the entire user base regardless of association. Unfortunately this is the most intensive part of the app and we hope to allow this kind of functionality down the road when things are settled and stable.

Expect plenty of style and layout tweaks as I roll out some much needed changes based on the great feedback we’ve received.

Thanks Cole, appreciate your thoughts and kind words.