Bloomfire

Class in Session

The original vision for Bloomfire was much broader than a social learning platform. Atomic’s research, design and planning practices helped focus and funnel that vision into a viable and differentiated product. We developed provisional personas based on Josh’s subject matter expertise in corporate learning. We used those personas to create a story map of high-level features. We designed basic interfaces in order to scope the project and set a budget. We continued to refine those interfaces throughout the development process. Josh worked directly with one of our designers to help define the user experience and provide direction for the development team’s upcoming iterations. One of our UX designers was consistently engaged with the development team from the beginning of the project, influencing and improving the application at each iteration. The result was more than an application with the perfect shade of #FFFFFF. Our research, design and planning contributed to an application that is beautiful as it is functional, and as always, a joy to use.

Professional Development

Creating this product was not without challenge, but our development team met them head on. Users needed to be able to easily upload and create content, without concern for compatibility. Our development team seamlessly integrated many different external services to support Bloomfire’s media content. We helped meet a series of hard deadlines imposed by industry trade shows. Our test-driven development approach gave us the ability to confidently add features right up to each major release point. Our product management efforts ensured that we had a cohesive feature set for each milestone up to the ultimate one in March, which marked Bloomfire’s launch at SXSW.

Getting Social

The solution that Atomic helped Josh create – Bloomfire.com – provides organizations with a collaborative learning platform that mimics and improves informal learning by providing users with a platform to build social learning communities. The communities are non-hierarchical: every learner can also be a teacher. The users can teach each other by creating “courses” comprised of uploaded content, including power-point, text, video, and screencasts. To enable easy sharing, the application has built-in screencasting and webcam capturing functionality. It also has many social aspects – you can follow teachers, make comments on course content, and create a user profile. The “manage” portion of the site gives admins the ability to manage users and content and offers valuable analytics on their community’s behavior.