Nokia recently launched a new site that allows users to use their imaginations and create new visions for headphones of the future. The headphones users create are mostly fictional, adding some wildly expressive features like hot rod exhaust pipes, peacock feathers, missiles, etc.

My latest attempt

The site is part of a contest Nokia is launching around the configurator. Users are invited to create and submit their designs online, where they'll be voted on by other users. The top 10 users will get a free trip out to Nokia's headquarters in the UK, where their designs will be produced into real headsets and given to them to keep.

When I first saw the application I thought it was a little silly, but after spending five minutes building a set of headphones I changed my mind. It's really fun, and the user experience is very smooth. I'd definitely buy these headphones if I could!

I recently caught up with the development team who built the headphone configurator. The application was developed by a digital marketing company called World Archipealgo in conjunction with WK and Creative Tank. World Arcehipelago head of Digital Marketing Sarah Arbuthnot was kind enough to chase down her development team and have them answer some questions for me:

InsideRIA: How long is this campaign scheduled to run?

Sarah, World Archipelago (WA): The Campaign will run until the end of 2008, upon which the competition will close and a Shortlist of acclaimed designs will appear on the site. After a short time the eventual 5 winners will be picked and showcased.

InsideRIA: Why did you choose to build the application in Flex / Flash?

WA: This project could have been developed in either Flash or Flex, but we chose Flex in the end because we find it’s component framework, general layout management, debugging and scripting environment more robust and extensive than flash’s.

Team collaboration is easy to manage with developers working on discrete elements of the site using collaboration tools like Subversion. Integrating into the main application then becomes a lot smoother than messing around with pesky fla’s in Flash.

Where appropriate, we prefer to build our applications using Remoting and Flex provides the tools to jump straight in get the backend hooked up. After 8 years of Flash we just prefer Flex as our development environment and try to use it where appropriate.

InsideRIA: Were there any particular development or design challenges you ran into in developing the application?

WA: Development-wise one of the challenges (which we hit with every project) was ‘memory management’. It takes time to optimize projects and make sure there no memory leaks. It’s a general problem we have with AS3. I guess we had it good back when AS1 was around ;)

The “Create your Own” style palette also posed a few problems. The client wanted “image map” style hotspots on the headphones as you rollover them. We didn’t fancy altering a 200+ images, performing hit-tests or creating numerous buttons in Flash. So we developed a simple “heat-map” technique to get around this problem, creating heatmap versions of the headphones in photoshop, and mapping the heat-map colours to the component parts. What could have taken days was reduced to hours. You gotta love AS3.

Design-wise, we had great designs to work with but as they say ‘The devils in the details’. This was a multilingual project so all labels and text had to be dynamic. Making gradient text effects was a fun problem to overcome ;)

InsideRIA Do you have a separate development team from your design team? If so, what does your firm do to encourage collaboration between the departments?

WA: We do have different teams, but there is quite an overlap as most of our Flex/Flash developers have an arts/design background. This normally allows for healthy back and forth collaboration. On this project the designs were actually supplied by W&K.

InsideRIA: Where can I get a pair of headphones with hot-rod exhaust pipes? :)

WA: Well, if you enter your design, (with hot-rod exhaust pipes), and get enough votes…..you could win….It’s always good to send to your friends and encourage them to vote for you of course….

InsideRIA: Anything else you want to share about the application or your company?

WA:: It was a great project to prove to people that a Flex application needn’t necessarily look like a Flex application. With some quality time spent on skinning, layout and design integration most people wouldn’t be able to tell you if this site was produced with Flash or Flex. It was also great to work with other agencies to share our experise, we are seeing this happen more and more, is it the death of the full service agency?

Using a framework like pureMVC is a great way also help set standards to encapsulate different elements of the application and conducive to team development.

Read more from RJ Owen.