Nick Bouton

Led front-end engineering team at Klue.com.

Protagonize is an award-winning creative writing community dedicated to writing a variety of forms of collaborative, interactive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate.

We developed Protagonize as an attempt to modernize the collaborative creative writing arena; this entailed providing enhanced usability to authors, creating better tools for them to… Show more

Protagonize is an award-winning creative writing community dedicated to writing a variety of forms of collaborative, interactive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate.

We developed Protagonize as an attempt to modernize the collaborative creative writing arena; this entailed providing enhanced usability to authors, creating better tools for them to publish and distribute their content, and allow them to easily work with others.

Protagonize launched at the end of 2008, and has been receiving an excellent response from users and the press, with over 30,000 authors signing up for the site since its debut. Show less

Founder and host of the the Vancouver Community Experience Group (#VanCX), which represents Vancouver-based online community developers, managers, and designers.

VanCX is kindly hosted by our good friends at Work [at] Play Media Labs, in the Railtown neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC, Canada.

After an extensive interview process, MAKE Technologies (now Dell Modernization) hired us in the fall of 2011 to work on a new subscription-based enterprise SaaS product that was in its initial stages of planning and requirements gathering. This product, known as AppShot, would help automate their existing business processes, exposing much of their application modernization technologies as a single, unified web-based B2B service that their clients could use directly.

While the first… Show more

After an extensive interview process, MAKE Technologies (now Dell Modernization) hired us in the fall of 2011 to work on a new subscription-based enterprise SaaS product that was in its initial stages of planning and requirements gathering. This product, known as AppShot, would help automate their existing business processes, exposing much of their application modernization technologies as a single, unified web-based B2B service that their clients could use directly.

While the first phase of development was spent prototyping with a very small team, primarily consisting of MAKE's engineering leads, Taunt, and an outside UX designer, the project eventually grew in size and scope substantially. The internal team we worked with grew and adapted in concert.

From the product development side, the feature set supported upon project completion was quite diverse. A broad set of user roles were defined, and the application's features included user management (including security roles), submission of applications or groups of applications for analysis, user-created survey management and delivery, custom reporting tools, and administration interface for MAKE to manage customer accounts.

One challenge we faced was a significant requirements change mid-stream, coupled with some upheaval in our team members at MAKE. We also switched outside visual design resources early in the project, which fortunately resulted in a major improvement to the app's UX.

While functionally complete, tested, and announced (and advertised) to the public, in the end, AppShot never launched. In the fallout of Dell's acquisition of MAKE in mid-2012, AppShot was shelved indeterminately. We hope it'll still see the light of day at some point in the future. Show less