Today we’re excited to start on a redesigned website.  Qik began as a tool to let people share their experience with their friends, family and the world – right from their mobile phone. Together with all of you who use the service every day – the service is teaching us what it wants to be and this website redesign is based on what we are learning every day. Here are some highlights of the improvements we have done.

The new front page

Our brand new front page (which you will see if you are not logged in) is aimed at new users providing them with the most relevant and useful information about Qik. This new page provides information on ways people use Qik, why people love Qik, and demonstration on how easy Qik is to use on various platforms.

The improved profile page – your new home

“How can I easily find out what new happened with me and my Qiks when I come to Qik?” This is one of those questions we were asked all the time. So, with this new site we are introducing “Recent Activity” – your new home on Qik.com. In this Recent Activity section you’ll find all that has happened around you and your Qiks – like new followers, new Qiks from people you follow, comments posted on your videos, new videos that were shared with you and more. Your recent activity also self updates – so no more page refreshes!  Just keep this page up and running and you’ll instantly see new updates.

In this new site you’ll notice that the live video box is missing from your profile page. The live video box was the place where you’d have earlier seen the live video play in your profile page. We scratched our heads to figure out how to best show the live video in this new scheme and we came up with something that we thought was pretty cool. Whenever you go live, the live video instantly pops up as the first item in the Recent Activity – after all it is your most recent activity . Give it a try and let us know what you think.

We have  also changed the sub navigation a bit as you can see below.

Thumbnails now have some more context

A year or so back, we introduced the ability for you and your friends to track your location while you Qik. This has quickly grown to more than 33% of our videos having some location information. Since we have Qikkers sharing their experiences from over 150 countries – we aer experimenting with a new style of video thumbnail that contains both the location information and the video itself. Why? It enables you to easily explore and find videos from your favorite location or wherever your travels take you. Enter the location of choice in the search box and discover the Qiks from that location. Keeping this in mind we have changed the top level navigation from “Videos” to “Explore”.

Comments and Chat are now one and the same

Earlier we used to have the notion of Chat and Comments. Chat would be when the person was live and it would show up on the phone, while comments were posted on the video. As we were designing this new site – we debated on whether we really needed both and if there was a simpler way to achieve both chat and comments. So, in this redesigned site – we have   merged chat and comment into one area. Now there’s one place to enter your thoughts, and if the video is live – it gets delivered as chat on your phone, and if it is not live – it gets posted as a comment on that video. When you check out the video page (the page where the video is played), you’ll see only one box below the video that can be used to post Chat and Comment.

We look forward to your feedback and ideas as we continue to improve to make Qik your home to share your experiences from your mobile phone. We look forward to hearing from you at support@qik.com.

This entry was posted on Monday February 1st, 2010 at 11:15 AM and is filed under Product, Qik.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.