What it is:

CircaVie, or “times of your life,” is a place to celebrate your life in an exciting new way … chronologically through an interactive timeline. Tell your life story or the story of your latest road trip, a day to remember, or a trip around the world. Any time, any picture, any video - mark it here and share it everywhere.

So all that’s nice. But what can you actually do with circaVie? Here’s one idea:

How it all started:

Back in February, my manager rang me up to talk about a new project based on a concept by AOL Developer, David McVicar. It was one of those “small team, quick turnaround” projects - one person on U/I, a project manager, four developers (off and on) an art director and a lead designer. The mission: to make a Flash-based web application that allows users to import photos and other media to create a visual timeline.

To be fair, there are other companies out there doing timeline web apps (OurStory, Xtimeline, EachDay.com and DandeLife to name a few), but David wanted to take his own approach. Of highest priority, make circaVie more “general audience” user-friendly (as opposed to being geared towards one segment) by being responsive to user input and easily integrating multimedia into the experience. Whew. Long sentence.

By the time I was brought into the fold a working prototype was already in progress - David began developing the concept in August 2006 after receiving an Innovation Grant to do social/personal timelines with photos and videos. Based on this initial test version, Jenna Marino constructed the wireframes while I created moodboards to nail down the look and feel. Here’s how the moodboards turned out:

Moodboard 01:

Moodboard 02:

Moodboard 03:

Moodboard 04:

Next up came the actual design, more UI revisions and meetings, meetings, meetings to discuss how the application would work, what the logo should look like and what we would be able to accomplish with the limited amount of time we had left. Corey Lucier (Flash Development), Jason Garber and Kelly Gifford (who both worked on the markup) took the finished design and voila! CircaVie was born.

The reception thus far as been pleasantly warm:

Mashable.com

“This is pretty neat: AOL has launched circaVie, an effortlessly simple (and well-designed) way to share timelines. The site provides a tool for creating Flash-based timelines: add photos, captions, text and links for all kinds of events.

Others can then view your timeline, scroll through it, skip to a certain date, search across all timelines, browse tags, embed timelines on other sites like MySpace (or AIMpages) and subscribe to a feed of that timeline. It is, in a word, neat. Someone needed to do timelines right, and I think they have. The next question is whether they can actually get the user base to sustain this thing.”*

*For an idea of how many users we have so far, check out the complete list of timelines already created (in less than one week!)

Other reviews:
SomewhatFrank.com
Blogowogo.com
webdev 2.0

A demo is available here (thanks demogirl!)

And a special thanks and congratulations to the circaVie team on a job well done!

David McVicar, Project Lead
Ari Kushimoto, Art Direction
Jayna Wallace, Design Lead
Jenna Marino, U/I Design
Corey Lucier, Flash Development
Kelly Gifford, Markup
Jason Garber, Markup
Dan Bradley, Operations

- Jayna