We have some exciting news this week: Kristina Schneider joined the doingText-team. She’ll take care of design and usability and already has some fine ideas. We’re thrilled and you can be, too. Expect some great changes!
Now for the new features of this week.

Add lines a new way

At the bottom of the discussion field there is now an “Add Line”-button. It adds a new line at the end of the text. We have added this button for usability reasons. People starting their first discussion ever, happened to be startled by the display of text within the lines and thereby not knowing that clicking the line and hitting enter creates a new line.

Growing text area for comments
Just like the line fields of your text grow with the content, now the the text field of the comments grow, too. This way the commenting person always has the whole comment in sight.

Confirming notifications
Inspired by the Growl app für Mac OS X, all confirming notifications now come along in that style. There’s a little rectangle showing up in the upper right corner of the site for a few seconds. It tells you what has been successfully done. It appears after events like changing that status of a discussion, adding collaborators to your discussion, sending an doingText-invite to someone or logging out of your account.

Negative CAPTCHAs
The dark side of being on top of the google search when it comes to “text collaboration” is that we’re becoming interesting for spammers. We have now implemented a negative CAPTCHA to cope with spambots at least for the near future. It’s called negative, because the CAPTCHA works exactly the other way round and you as a user won’t see anything of it. There is no extra field the user has to fill in, but an invisible field for the bots called Honeypot. If something is filled in that hidden field it must be a spambot. Those requests will then be ignored.
More information on negative CAPTCHAs can be found on Ned Batchelder’s site.

This week brings some nice improvements. First, a lot of you have asked for the option to protect discussions. And here it is.

sharing settings

Behind the link “sharing settings” you will now find the link of the discussion as well as the option to protect it. Protection takes place by a self-chosen password which you then give to your cowriters separately. Plus, protected discussions are automatically encrypted via https.

Then, the handling of the edit mode is improved. Until last week, when you clicked into a line you had to wait for the server for a reaction before being able to start editing. Most of the time and for users with a good bandwidth that’s not a problem. But, nonetheless, technics might not always be that exemplary. Therefore now the edit mode is reached at once, without waiting for the server.
Paired with that, saving is now faster as well. You will experience the difference by an immediately disappearing save button and the appearance of the well known spinner.

• Here we would like to hear your opinion! Are you happy with that way of saving the changes? Do you happen to have any problems? Tell us down in the comments or by sending an email to support@doingtext.com. Thanks.

Next, some of you have asked for shorter URLs. These are now available in 6-character-length so can you can easily give away the URL while being on the phone and it’s more than simple for cowriters to write it down somewhere.

Last but not least, our introduction video is finished and published. It appears on the starting page and gives a short 1:33-min-intro on the core features of doingtext.

doingtext.com intro on Vimeo.

We wish you a lot of fun with the improvements and please remember the spinner-feedback.

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.