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Fogbugz

Helping Software Teams Communicate

[Dan’s] first design was really good, and I knew that it would be better to just shut up and give him artistic license to do whatever he thought was best. I thought that we could try and meddle in his design, tweaking things left and right, and get another bad design-by- committee, or we could just tell him we trusted him and whatever he delivered would be exactly what went live.

Which it was.

Joel Spolsky, Co-Founder, Fog Creek Software & Stack Overflow

FogBugz is a very thorough bug-tracking application and the flagship product of Fog Creek Software, owned and managed by Joel Spolsky, of the Joel on Software fame. Representing Happy Cog, I had the pleasure of helping the Fog Creek team redesign the FogBugz site.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with this project. Joel and crew basically gave me free reign, so the direction was fairly open. While they mentioned their “wish list” to me, they left the door wide open to ideas.

While Fog Creek did the information architecture for the site, I was responsible for design as well as front-end coding. Their team uses jQuery, so it was a rewarding first experience to use a JavaScript library. I definitely had some frustrations with it, but I’d wager that had more to do with my inexperience with libraries and shoddy JavaScript skills than with the framework.

If you’re interested in some of the exposition for this project, Joel has a pretty extensive write-up on his own site.

Client

Fog Creek Software

Role

  • Art Direction
  • Design
  • Development

Year

2007

Agency

Happy Cog

Status

No longer online