The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

Ready for something awesome? We're excited to announce today the release of Bounce, our newest app that helps people design for people.

What is Bounce?

Bounce is a lightweight application for giving quick feedback on a web page. You tell it the page, add your notes, and then share your feedback with anyone you want.

Why did we make Bounce?

Thousands of people are already using our flagship app, Notable. Notable is an incredibly powerful way to work with feedback and both produce better designs, and help other produce better designs.

What we want to do with Bounce is bring some of that experience to everyone else — that's why Bounce is free for everyone, has no logins or accounts, has no limit on who you share your feedback with and doesn't require any software to be installed.

What's in it for us?

Of course we'd love every Bounce user to become a Notable user — part of our motivation is to introduce people to the idea of quick feedback and eventually graduate them to the much more powerful Notable — but our motivation for Bounce is really much more fun than just marketing.

Some of it is in spreading our ideas about feedback and designing for people just as wide as we can, and some of it learning more about how people use the tools we provide. A lot of our motivation is on our end, with more innovation.

Innovation, without the overhead.

Notable is a big application with thousands of users. If we want to test out new concepts we have a built-in audience — but we also have an obligation to be more deliberate, and to be sure our iterations are a net positive for all our users. Bounce has no such limitations, so we were able to quickly innovate in key areas:

Interface Design: Bounce gave us the opportunity to try out new layouts, controls and visual styles. We tried out several ways of paring down the toolbar to a single, thin element with clear actions and controls. We also had the chance to develop a new visual style for lightweight ZURB applications — which you'll see again soon in our upcoming Parade application!

Interactions: We're always trying to refine the interactions in Notable, but in Bounce we could start from scratch and try out a lot of different ways of adding notes, creating screenshots, sharing and more. The ways you add notes, edit them, and remove them in particular are much more considered and intuitive than any we've had before (and Matt will be publishing a post soon on how we created that matrix of interactions).

Code: We're always learning better ways to create pages and applications. Bounce has been an incredibly fruitful application for us already, changing the way we implement themeable designs, improving how we structure applications, and kick-starting two brand new jQuery plugins which we've since released to anyone that can use them.

Fun with Bounce

Bounce has been a great learning experience for us, and an awesome way to play around with layout, code and interactions. Bounce has also been a fun place for us to cut loose a little more than usual and try out some fun elements, like supporting two different themes (regular and glow in the dark. That's right.) and a fun little javascript exercise you'll see when you go to capture a new screenshot.

Get Bouncing!

That's Bounce — what it does, why we made it, and what's awesome about it. Go try it out! It's free, fast and really easy to use. Let us know what you think of it in the comments — we'll be working to implement the lessons learned on Bounce into Notable!

Start Bouncing »