Week 14 - Takeoff
It seems that as you approach a product launch the list of things you have to do before you launch seems to get longer and longer. We spent last week furiously testing, going through user flows, sending ourselves email, entering nonsense into forms and generally kicking the tires.
This lead to lots of niggly issues and a couple of serious redesign issues where we changed redirects or simplified user actions. Arun also spent time adding feedback messages and simple guidance so the first-time user experience is less confusing.
I also squeezed in our second admin redesign of the month based on the feedback and a couple of mockups we got from Winnie's designs. It's as much an evolution as a revolution and Winnie even included a couple of design ideas we'd discarded without prompting (the subtley-embossed Gameplan logo).
The admin interface now has much better balance and navigation; areas in which it was in desperate need of attention. Whilst there are a couple of rough spots and challenges in terms of elegantly adding future functionality we're super happy with it.
Removing Features
We realised this week that we'd slightly overshot on features for our first release and that we were perhaps including too many (slightly half-baked) options. So another part of this week was removing features that we hadn't fully considered.Of course we expect to reintroduce some of these features over the next few weeks.
Lift Off
And so, as of now, Gameplan is live. You can sign up for free and test it out. In fact we'd love you to do just that. And please tell us what's awesome (hopefully) and what sucks (we probably need telling).The plan is to do a soft 'nerd' launch to colleagues and peers on Twitter (follow Andy here and Arun here) and this blog so that some friendly faces can have a play over the next 24-48 hours before we drop a polite email to the people who've signed up on the homepage over the last few months.
Your feedback is more than welcome... drop us an email or go to help.gameplanapp.com.
Stats
37 issues closed on GitHub, no new features added (but some rewritten!) leading to a current total of 76. 4070 lines of code and 7786 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:1.9.
