As you might have already noticed, the start site is under ongoing reconstruction. While talking to users, the start page got into our focus. It became obvious that it doesn’t perfectly convey what doingText is actually all about. For this reason we are currently revising the start page. Some first changes are already applied and there is more to come.

For the concept of the start page we try to take the perspective of someone completely unfamiliar with doingText. When you (and this counts for all of us, I guess) read of a new online service or some new product in general, one of the questions that come to mind is: “Are there already people out there who can tell me something about the tool? What’s it good for? How do other folks use it?”
To meet this question, we want to bring in the voice of all those of you already using doingText. Sharing your experiences is the motto.

• What is your top reason for using doingText?
• Which part of it is the most striking motivation for you to leave Word, GoogleDocs and all the others behind or how can it complement other tools?
• In which context does doingText fit into your working habits?

We have created a discussion where all the reasons are collected. Some aspects are already mentioned and we hope you can bring in much more.

This week is not so much about the tool itself, but rather about the people using doingtext. Alex and I sat together and thought about who you might be. What your work environments are. What you like and don’t like about doingtext. Whether there is a feature you’d love to have, but we haven’t thought about that yet. That kind of stuff. And since we know that you people hate click galleries and since we’re no online news paper, we made it simple: 1 page, 11 questions.

• To the survey.

The second thing is we inform people via newsletter now. This morning the 1st edition went out. Yay! The next is to come in 2 weeks and then so on. There will always be a handy overview about all new features. And the rest of the email is to be filled with specialties as for example the survey in this fortnight’s email.

But there is also a change to doingtext. When you next go to your profile, you’ll find the discussions listed in a new arrangement. There is now 1 list with all discussions and those are sorted by recency, i.e. those with the most recent changes are on top of the list.

As already written, the presentations at the BarCamp Berlin 3 and the Webmontag were awesome. I think, I don´t blow out of all proportions if I say that the respective audience had loads of fun.
In the aftermath, quite a number of folks gave doingtext a shot and some of them even found the time to blog about it.

• Markus Spath from netzwertig.com wrote about “An Texten zusammenarbeiten und diese kommentieren” (To work on texts together and comment them). He surrounds his review with a short intro on how text collaboration used to be in the old days and gives an excellent note on what doingtext is about: the pure text and the communication about it.
• Miriam Winkels claimed in her Pisastudio “You are not alone“. As an upcoming teacher she is interested in using web2.0 technologies in the school environment and thinks about how doingtext can ease working processes or even make them possible in the given time frames every teacher has.
• Regine Heidorn kind of followed her first impressions in the usage and gave a good and deep overview of how doingtext works, which features it has and - most important - how you feel about it as a user: “Doingtext - Textarbeiten” (Doingtext - Doingtext).
• Dirk Nolte let himself inspire by Regine and instantly tried doingtext for coworking on one of his blog posts: “DoingText. Texte online bearbeiten.” (Edit texts online).

But last week was indeed not all about presenting the tool and speaking to future users. Alex found the time to implement a feature which comes along like a a tiny, little thingy, but with great effect.
Changes to the text will be presented to you at a glance when you come back to your discussion.
The colors of the comment balloons will show you what happened or if actually anything has happened. No more reading the whole text, trying to remember what the last version might have been. No more clicking the comments balloon only to see that you were indeed the last person to change this line. Effortless text collaboration is our claim. Effortless text collaboration is what you shall get. So, how does it work and what do the colors tell you?

Doingtext gives you a quick look on what has happened in your time of absence by coloring the comment balloon. The dark orange indicates changes (comments and/or edits) recently added by your coworkers. The dark green refers to lines which you are the last editor of. And the pale ones say that there have been no changes made in the meantime. Simple as that it shall be.

And as always: Tell me if you happen to have a problem, an idea or whatever. Either by commenting here or by sending an email.

So… We had our first public presentation of doingtext here at the BarCamp Berlin. Now, that deserves a short yay! It went very well. We received very positive feedback by most of the people attending the session. Me, I tend to believe, it was the cat content that made it… But no, that’s not really true. There were lots of folks being interested in the tool. Responses like “Oh shit, that doingtext thing would’ve been perfect for my last project!” brings little smiles into my face. Plus, the questions brought in the discussion brought a clearer view on what kind of collaboration and text types doingtext can help the most.
We embedded the presentation into a broader review of text collaboration tools, beginning with the analog way of working face-to-face and with a pencil and paper. From there on we drew the line to the digital universe and took a deeper look at how the analog way of text collaboration is handled by the digital world and how things can be made even easier with the technique. In the following days I will probably bring some more content on this. Maybe even some cats…

For now the first day of the BarCamp is over. But before the evening begins, I would like to bring a big THANK YOU to Jan for spreading the word - and doing that very successful!

And for those of you being in berlin the next days: Our second presentation while the Berlin Web Week will be at the Webmontag. Hope, we’ll see you there.

First, I may shortly introduce myself: Katrin’s my name. I just started working with Alex on the doingtext-universe. Doingtext is made for collaboration and, based on that idea, we want to collaborate with the users as well. A list of channels how to reach us can be found in the previous post On user feedback by Alex. In this area of the universe I will back him up.

On the level of closed beta, doingtext is definitely still susceptible for bugs (or, as I like to call it, open for new experiences with every kind of browser) and even more definitely open for ideas on new features. Besides getting active feedback via twitter or this blog, one essential tool for your ideas is the uservoice Feedback Forum.
If you happen to stumble upon a bug, feel free to describe it here. Also, you can suggest features you would like to see on doingtext as well as changes of existing ones. Alex will use the Forum to decide on which feature next to be programmed. With the votes you can generally mark your enthusiasm for a certain feature and there is the option to discuss a suggested feature in the comments. Additionally, there will be extra polls in the future.

So keep up your voice and let us know which feature you wish to see.

For me, one of the most important things to pay attention to when developing a product is the user feedback. Since the users are the ones the product is made for, what they think, like or dislike about it should be the basis for (most) of the work put into the product. So I want to collect as much of that feedback as I can, as early as I can, then turn that into new ideas, prioritize those and finally implement new features based on them.

The challenge now is that users can give feedback on a multitude of levels. If I want to capture as much as possible I have to listen to them on as many levels as I can - or at least the ones most used. So here are my feedback channels:

Live Usability Testing

I have started with this yesterday. The product is not available online yet so invited a friend to come over and take a closer look at the development version on my laptop. The basic idea is that you let someone who doesn’t know the product yet either browser around randomly or give him a task to accomplish. While clicking through the site you let her talk out loud what she thinks about what she expects to happen when doing this and that, what she understand and what not. And you sit next to the screen with pen and paper, paying close attention to every move of the cursor, every change in facial expression (watching out for that WTF look on his face) and write everything down. Especially with the first few users you will discover loads of bugs and usability problems you as the developer of the software would never be able to find, because when you use the software, you unconsciously click around those problematic areas that the deeper regions of your brain know about, because it was them who wrote the code that made these areas work (or not).

So we yesterday found a good amount of smaller bugs, unexpected behaviors and other usability problems like texts being too far at the edge of the screen to be noticed.

Feedback form

Also yesterday I added a feedback form to the site so users can send me a short comment whether something works for them or not.

My first idea on this was to simply implement the form myself. Just add a link to the top of the page that says feedback. When someone clicks on it they get directed to a form where they can enter a text and that gets then sent to me via email. What I didn’t like about this solution was that I would have had to implement a feature that would have to do nothing with the product itself, thus stealing time for working on the actual thing. Plus, there must be fancier ways than a simple form, but I don’t want to bother too much with this myself.

So I looked at 3rd party solutions, many choices here:

• Add a link to a lighthouse issue tracker - too technical (you need to understand the concepts of a ticketing system), and users would have to sign up with lighthouse in order to leave a comment
• getsatisfaction.com - much more customer oriented, people can simply write a comment on what they like or not; users still have to sign up with them and they also don’t offer a way to integrate with my site.
• uservoice.com - I finally settled with them. UserVoice adds a feedback button to the right margin of the browser window. When clicking on that a dialog pops up that allows you to enter a comment. What it also allows you is to vote for suggestions made by others. The suggestions are then sorted by most votes, so it’s like digg for user feedback. Cool.

capturing user feedback via UserVoice

Google Analytics

Analytics allows me to monitor the behavior of the users once the site is live by tracking every click on the site. This is more an indirect way of measuring feedback but through statistics you can get a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t. But that’s for later.

Twitter search

As mentioned before I have set up a twitter account for doingText that will announce everything important. I hope that people will start talking about doingText on Twitter once we let a larger amount of people into the closed beta so I have set up a search for doingtext and subscribed to the RSS feed.

Blog

This blog of course is a way to collect feedback, too. Once the beta starts I will hopefully get some comments here when I post keep posting about updates and news.

Conclusion

With this setup I now get direct feedback from people sitting here with me, users of the site can send me their thoughts, I can measure the activity on the site and I know what’s being said on twitter. Not so bad for a start. Now back to fixing the product.