Case Study: www.sizeasy.com

Here at Humble Technologies we had trouble when shopping online. We kept buying things and when they arrived on our doorstep they were a completely different size to what we imagined. We did get our rulers out and draw things but surely there was a better solution? We couldn't find one so we built sizeasy. Sizeasy is an easy to use web application that lets you generate visualizations based on size dimensions. Your generated objects can then be compared against everyday items and once complete your comparisons can be saved and shared.

Technology

The site makes heavy use of AJAX using the prototype and scriptaculous libraries. The individual images used to make up the visualization are generated server side using ImageMagick and RMagick. As dynamic image generation is costly on the server processor the site make heavy use of caching so images are not generated unless they have not previously been generated. This keeps the application responsive and the server load to a minimum. The site also adopts some powerful SEO techniques which has lead to a vast increase in search engine referrals.

Success

The site written entirely in Ruby on Rails went live in September 2006 and within days had the attention of some popular bloggers and was soon getting great traffic. We have had an immense amount of positive feedback about the usability, stability and originality of the site which continues to grow in popularity. Here are a few of our favorite comments about the site...

When I'm shopping online for a new camera or other expensive little box shaped item, I have trouble visualizing the size of it ... A new site called sizeeasy lets you enter the dimensions of the gadget you're interested in and compare it to other common objects ... so you can see how big it really is.

Thanks to the ever-convenient sizeasy.com, we've been able to get an idea of how big Apple's new iPhone is in comparison to other smartphones in a similar class to Apple's first cellular device.

Sizeasy is one of those simple things that seem kind of obvious but which I probably never would have thought of myself ... definitely handy and is going straight into my bookmarks.

Web site sizeasy is a really cool visualization tool designed to give you an idea how big something is.