Current Happenings with The FOSSIL Project
We are pleased to announce that—after months of research, interviews and meetings—we have contracted with Atmosphere Apps to build the myFOSSIL website!
Founded in Gainesville, Florida by a physician-in-training, Atmosphere Apps is best known for mobile products for the health care community including drug reference guides, diagnostic tools and continuing education courses. You can read more about the company at http://www.atmosphereapps.com/. A number of criteria led to our selection of Atmosphere Apps among a pool of other viable options. We were impressed by Atmosphere Apps’ track record of bringing products to market, capacity to meet deadlines and provide excellent service, experience working with the University of Florida, diverse expertise of their staff (including designers, coders and usability testers), and ability to produce a website that the community can sustain over time at reasonable expense.
Although Atmosphere Apps built its reputation on tools for hand-held devices like smart phones, they have the capability to create products for all existing platforms. Our contract with Atmosphere Apps is to build a “mobile-optimized” website, which means myFOSSIL will function on computers, tablets (e.g, ipads) and smart phones. The biggest change you will see between the current myFOSSIL website and the one created by Atmosphere Apps is increased interactivity. That is, members of the community will be able to participate in conversations, post announcements, etc. directly without going through a request process like is required now.
The schedule for the development of myFOSSIL is as follows. Between now and the middle of July we will be in a Design Discovery phase. During this period, Atmosphere Apps will take the “wish list” for the website we created based on input from the community provided on surveys and at the kick-off meeting at NACP and build a “wire-frame” (essentially a flow-chart) that maps out all the possible site components, where they may sit on the site, how to navigate around the site, the cost of each element and, of course, what myFOSSIL will look like. A team will then start making decisions, including which functions we definitely want to add to the first new version of myFOSSIL and which we will add later. Between the middle of July and early October, we will go through several iterations of website development. Members of the FOSSIL community will play critical roles throughout this iterative process, helping us test the website and providing feedback to ensure that myFOSSIL meets your needs and expectations.
Our goal is to unveil the new website by mid-October. In the meantime, kudos to Kassie Hendy for keeping the existing myFOSSIL website operable and up-to-date! And be sure to continue to send us information you want us to share.