Thought & Theory

If you’re like us then you have a ton of feeds to deal with everyday. Also, if you’re like us you have to manage about 10 or 20 different productivity apps (Basecamp, Freshbooks, Unfuddle, etc) on your side and on the client side. Its gets really hard to manage all this activity and while most of these apps offer RSS Feeds, they’re password protected and therefore can’t be used in Google Reader. That makes for a huge inefficiency, and since Thought & Theory is moving forward and expanding lately (more on that tomorrow), we need ways to reduce the amount of noise during our day.

Enter NewsFire for Mac.

Before, NewsFire was actually a paid desktop app, but now its absolutely FREE! I can’t tell you how much this has helped me personally. I can now view all activity across clients and internal projects in one window and then react accordingly. Its what email is supposed to be. I still keep the random design blogs on google reader but for my desktop, I want ways to see what’s going on in my work life in one shot.

So if you get a second, check out the app and see if it helps you out.

Are there any other apps out there that you use to make your life easier?

We make mistakes. Even though we continue to get great positive feedback for Only Human, we are determined to find more and more ways to improve the user experience.

Sprint 2 begins this week and here are some of the mistakes we’ve made while running Only Human and how we plan on fixing them:

Posting without Registration

We made the mistake of: Solving problems we didn’t have

One of the biggest hurdles of starting a community is easing the registration process. There’s countless reasons why we chose to make users register but the main reason was the fear of spam and irrelevant posts. While it has reduced the amount of spam to zero, its stifled growth by restricting people who want to share their story immediately and don’t want to register up front.

We were trying to solve the spam problem before we even had a spam problem and that came at the expense of alienating casual users. So we’re coming up with a new system that eases that joining process and promotes growth in the community.

Rating System

We made the mistake of: Not understanding how important feedback and validation is to users

There’s many different motivations for posting a story on Only Human. But one we didn’t account for in the design stage was that users like getting multiple forms of feedback. People want to know that their story has been heard and how it affects other people in the community. Its a basic human desire and we haven’t done a great job fostering it. But that will change with this new rating system.

The new rating system will be a two-fold improvement to Only Human. In one sense, it will give users more ways of providing relevant feedback to other users. It another sense, it will provide an extra way to sort through all the stories and find the type of content you want faster.

But wait…there’s more!

These are just a few of the ways we’ll be improving Only Human in this next sprint. If you have anymore suggestions you can personally email both me and jason. Thanks for your support and stay tuned.

Just rolled out some new features last night including messaging and human-readable URL’s. We’re about ready to start our second sprint this week so stay tuned for more upgrades and more ways to share your story and connect with others.

We’re having some issues moving from MYSQL 4 to 5 at the moment so please be patient with us as we roll out the new database along with the new features. You may have received a request email from one of us, please be patient while we try to work through these issues tonight.

via crazyegg.com

I remember when I went to the Future of Web Apps in San Francisco last year and Kevin Rose @ Digg.com elaborated on why he chose not to use tagging on his site. I really love the idea of tagging so I was always curious why he chose a category-based architecture.

Five minutes into his presentation he goes on to explain that when it came down to it, tagging didn’t help the everyday user of the site. In their case it would’ve fragmented the information too much and it would be hard for the user to find what they wanted. I think his decision showed a lot of discipline because they didn’t blindly follow what the 2.0 crowd was doing. Although, its ironic since their site is about wisdom of the crowds.

Now, I didn’t choose to use a category based system just because Digg was using one. I’d be missing the point completely if I did that. But here is what we did instead to help us make a decision.

First, I spent a good week asking various experts key questions, reading Bokardo’s Blog and reading countless articles about the psychology of tagging and how it worked. At that point it really seemed like tagging would be the ideal architecture but I had one more thing to consider. The everyday users.

So, I took a second to think about our target demographic (25 - 50 year olds) for Only Human. As a personal experiment, I analyzed what normal people do when they come to a site using a tagging based navigation. They freeze over the overwhelming amount of choices. It doesn’t make sense to the average user, and most people give up and just go to another site.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of tagging. Its an incredible innovation and I personally like using it on sites like flickr.com and del.icio.us. But, the site and its users have to come first over my own personal preferences.

So even with all the articles and success stories of tagging based sites, I made the decision that our core users would find the site much simpler if there were a structured taxonomy instead of a loose, fragmented tagging system. Now we could be wrong in the future, but so far according to our stats, it seems that it was the right decision.