Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Hi folks. Please pardon the recent radio silence here. We have a couple of exciting things going on. First and foremost, we are in the process of a pretty significant overhaul of the ProjectPipe user interface, which we will be rolling out in April.
Our push in the initial release was to make the underlying engine rock solid, with the expectation that our users would help us identify usability shortcomings, and we’d gradually refine the user interface. Thank you to everyone who gave us feedback in the last couple of months, good and bad. Especially the bad.
We’re focusing our energies on making the “new user experience” intuitive and productive, while making sure the UI doesn’t hinder the Power User that knows what they’re doing. We’ve cut out a great deal of visual clutter in the process. The new screens “feel” like they should have been there all along.
One of the main Lessons Learned from our initial release is this:
Don’t build your application for Power Users that you don’t yet have.
One of the core principles that we hold is that “You know more about the needs of your project than we as a software vendor do”. To that end, we’ve made pretty much all of the content in ProjectPipe configurable. In hindsight, we strove to make ProjectPipe simple, but there are a couple of cases where the original UI didn’t strike the right balance between out-of-the-box intuitiveness and Power User configurability.
We use ProjectPipe every day, and as author/users, we didn’t pick up on some of the little things (and one or two bigger things 
) that could stall the forward progress of a brand new user. Since we know what the app does, we see past these issues and can focus on the work at hand. It’s the classic case of being too close to the problem.
As we’ve been going through this redesign, the “new user experience” is the basis for all decisions that we make. This approach is paying dividends. Big time.
I’ll keep you posted as we approach the rollout of this next major release. In closing, to any aspiring Micro-ISVs out there, remember: If the core functionality of your application isn’t blatantly obvious out-of-the-box, new users may not stick around to become Power Users.
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