Making MOO MiniCards

Jason’s Goldman’s post on MOO Flickr MiniCards reminded me that I wanted to get some for handing out when I met new folks here in NZ.

Making the cards is very easy. You pick your photos, then position them within a cropping outline. It’s low weight creativity. And a lot of fun.

There are a number of nice interaction touches throughout the process. There’s an attention to detail I very much enjoy. My favorite was the text length indicators when filling out the information for the back of your card.

See those green bars under each text box? They dynamically increase in size as you get closer to the character limit. It’s possible I only know what they mean because I already know that text boxes can have limits… It’s also possible that it’s easily ignored until the limit is reached, at which point there is enough information to quickly understand what is happening. Regardless, I love the idea.

Things weren’t entirely smooth though. When submitting the order form, I was greeted with this confounding fellow:

I have no idea what “Error:-25, Bad checksum” means. There wasn’t anything else on the form to help me figure it out. My heart momentarily sank. What if the site was busted and all my work picking and cropping images was lost? I asked myself if the cards were worth doing it all over again. The quick answer was “No”.

Luckily, I entered the same information again and it worked. My guess would be I had a typo in my credit card number (I do that a lot) and it failed the initial check to see if the number was valid.

If the error had said as much, I probably would have muttered something to myself about number’s being a cruel mistress and then forgotten all about it. Instead, I had a fun and rewarding experience quickly changed into anxiety.

It wasn’t a big deal in the end. I can’t wait to see my cards and I’d highly recommend Moo to anyone that has a decent collection of Flickr photos. But it does serve as a reminder of the importance of paying as much attention to the details that happen infrequently as those that happen regularly.