An article by Tim Green for The Bold.
Website contact forms… I’m boring you already, right? Well, hang in there my friends because this article is about how we did something a little different to make contacting our company more fun. I’m talking about the mini-printer project we recently made live on The Bold contact page.
This project began with conversations about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how we could experiment with IoT by connecting our website to a physical device in the office.
Out of all the ideas we came up with, this one at least had a purpose — to make reaching out to our team a little more fun and interactive. In a nutshell, this project involved connecting our website contact form with a Rasberry Pi that is powering a thermal receipt printer and a video camera.
To do what, you ask…
Well, now you can use a form to message us — and it will print in real-time on a mini-printer that you (and anyone else on our contact page at the time) can watch via a live video feed.
Cool… why?
Ok, we realise this hasn’t necessarily made it any easier or more effective for people to reach us. If anything, it made our contact form way less private (that’s ok, there are other ways to contact us). We did it for kicks, for us and for others. Websites have this great disconnect from the business and the people they represent. We now have more of a connection — you can message us something (nice, hopefully) and watch it print out right there and then in our office — whilst our team is working away in the background.
At night, the printer is all lit up, ready for people to send us messages for us to read when we arrive back the next morning.
The result
We, fortunately, did a soft launch of our mini-printer, making it live and not telling a soul — to see what happened next.
One of the first things we received was a massive print out of scripture warning the covid-19 vaccine will give us the mark of the beast. Stupid spam… we added a ReCaptcha.
From then on, we’ve had messages from (actual) people who are just browsing our website — people we wouldn’t normally hear from because they don’t necessarily have a project to collaborate with us on. We’ve been sent compliments about our website, jokes (a few of these… we must look like we need cheering up), and random greetings in a variety of languages.
I’m sure there’s some abuse on its way too, this is the internet after all. But for now, it's just been niceties. We feel a little more connected to the randoms visiting our website, and if we have a spare moment we reply via the printer too. Happy days.
So, what are you waiting for? Jump on our website now, go to the contact page and send us a message to let us know what you think.