Bounce

We understand that nobody wants to expose something they've worked so hard on to criticism, but receiving feedback doesn't have to be an ego bruiser. In fact, it's darn right necessary when working in design. However, the key is to give and receive good feedback.

With Bounce, we've made it easy peasy to give and get good feedback. Here's how it works: grab a screenshot from any URL (or image file), add some notes, and bounce it around with a unique URL. Your friends will add some feedback and bounce back at you.

Getting Bounced

Bounce had its origins in our flagship app Notable. We were really stoked that thousands of people were using Notable to give quick feedback on web pages. So we thought … what the heck, let's bring that to everyone without those pesky logins or accounts.

We were also partly motivated by a strong desire to broadcast the importance of feedback on helping design better products for people. Some of our motivation was also to learn more about how people use the tools we provide. But who are we kidding? We wanted a new kitchen to cook up some innovation.

A Testbed for New Awesomeness

When it came to testing out our new wicked ideas, it wasn't easy to just go messing around in Notable. If our new iterations weren't up to snuff, we'd risk peeving our thousands of users. Bounce, on the other hand, doesn't have that same limitation. In other words, game on!

Bounce gave us some playroom to fiddle with new layouts, controls, and visual styles. We even got ballsy and tried out several ways of paring down the toolbar to a single, thin element with clear actions and controls. Get this, we even developed a new visual style for our lightweight ZURB apps — like Clue.

Bounce allowed us to mess with different ways of adding notes, creating screenshots, and sharing our feedback. When it came to creating better pages and applications, Bounce proved to be a gold mine, changing the way we implemented design and improved how we structure applications.

Bouncing Ball

As you wait for your screen capture, a tiny red ball bounces on your screen. Believe it or not, the inspiration for that ball comes from the ZURB Ball Wars of years past. See we once had these little yellow balls that we hurled around the office. We had an arms race in the office — who could stockpile the most balls. Then launch a preemptive strike against some poor, unfortunate soul who'd get a ball square in the face. Eventually, all the balls disappeared and thus the Ball Wars came to an end.

We never forgot the Ball Wars and thought a bouncing ball would be a good visual to pass the time as Bounce captured a webpage. However, putting a bouncing ball on the screen was a challenge. We had to figure out all the small details and get the physics just right to make sure the ball reacted like a real, physical ball as it hit the imaginary ground of the screen. We're really proud that we actually got the ball to squish when it hits that imaginary floor. That's pretty awesome.

Glow in the Dark

Bounce gave us a chance to let our hair down, having a little more fun than usual (and we have a lot of fun). We did some funky things with the app, such as supporting two different themes — regular and glow in the dark. There's also a fun little javascript exercise that pops up when you go to capture a new screenshot.

If you want to give quick, snappy feedback on a website, then Bounce is a good tool to use. However, don't take our word for it ... see what the The New York Times and PC World have to say about Bounce.

Check out our other feeder apps: Axe, Chop, Clue, Reel, Spur. and Strike.