Hey Zeep Developers! Our current version of the Zeep Mobile signup panel has been bugging me since we first released it. I’m making some improvements and wanted to let you know what’s coming and give you a chance to give feedback.

First, the current panel

And the updated version

So, what’s different?

Goodbye, country dropdown

The country dropdown in the current version is a disaster! For one, it gives users the false impression that our API works all over the world (we only support the US). Second, it makes the panel load so slowly it hurts. I ran a few tests the load times were regularily clocking in at over 10 seconds. It’s mostly because each of the flags in the dropdown is in individual image.

Some new styles

In the spirit of making the panel load faster, I’ve done away with most of the images that give the panel it’s current look. All of the rounded corners are now achieved via CSS with the border-radius property. Sure, it only works in the “good” browsers, but if your users are still riding the interwaves on the old IE, they don’t really care about how websites look now, do they?

New wording

I updated a lot of the copy to make things easier to understand. I replaced any instance of mobile with SMS. Hopefully the new wording will increase the number of signups for you guys!

A narrow version

In case you want to stick the panel in a sidebar or somewhere narrow, I made some tweaks to accomodate that. Adding a &width=narrow parameter to the iframe source URL will load an additional stylesheet that makes the panel display correctly when it’s in a narrow space. The screenshot there fits in a 200px space.

What do you guys think?

It’s still a work in progress, so let me know your thoughts and suggestions. We’re planning to push this change (among with various other improvements) early next week.

Happy Zeeping!

Tags: Panel

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Announcements. 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.