Project updates on profile page.

[traverseda]

Users like to see the results of their funding.

Integrate a simple "updates" section into user profiles. For added points, make the updates section a feed reader, for integration with other platforms.

[chadwhitacre]

For the record, the first incarnation of this was "The Horn," which is slated for retirement (#1466).

[traverseda]

Out of curiosity, why did you choose that name for it?

[chadwhitacre]

@traverseda I was trying to capture two things in one: updates ("tooting your own horn") and feedback ("tooting someone else's horn").

[chadwhitacre]

How's that for kitchy? ;-)

[traverseda]

Pretty damn kitchy. The weird thing is that you seem proud of that ;p

In all seriousness, that's the kind of decision I question. It hurts usability, and I don't think you have a good enough reason to do that. At a glance, I can't tell what half the features on your site are supposed to do, or how it actually works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

The function should be apparent from the form.

There's a lot of posts here. Have you had this kind of discussion before? I'm not averse to reading through archives, if there's not too much. I'd like to understand where you're coming from.

It seems like you don't really care about gamefication or usability.

[chadwhitacre]

Pretty damn kitchy. The weird thing is that you seem proud of that ;p

Hey @hurlothrumbo, are you reading this? ^^^

In all seriousness, that's the kind of decision I question.

You're not the only one: #1075. I mean, yeah. "Toots" and "the horn" are kind of embarrassing. I'm embarrassed by that decision. I question it. TBH, I implemented horn-tooting on a Friday night while inebriated. So there ya go. (BTW, we've tightened up a bit since then, and I no longer commit to master or deploy without code review.)

At a glance, I can't tell what half the features on your site are supposed to do, or how it actually works.

Agreed. Prompted by observations of that sort (e.g.), I wrote a piece three and a half months ago called "Relentless Refinement," wherein I proposed that we start using our "About" pages to drive product clarity and improvement.

There's a lot of posts here. Have you had this kind of discussion before?

Variations of it, yes. However, a couple months after "Relentless Refinement," I followed up with a piece called "Focus," which was about bringing greater discipline to our development process. The upshot is that we're now two months into a focus on "Infrastructure": refactoring, testing, and documenting code, improving our tooling, addressing some accounting and legal issues, and otherwise cleaning up under the hood. The purpose is to make it nicer to hack on Gittip and remove some obvious obstacles to scaling. We haven't made a user-facing change for two months. Once we climb back out of the infrastructure rabbit hole we'll go back to "Relentless Refinement" (it's really the same thing applied at a different level, of course).

I'm not averse to reading through archives, if there's not too much.

There's a fair amount. :-)

For a weekly summary of progress across all Gittip projects, see: http://tinyletter.com/gittip/letters.

For blog-sized reflections and strategizing from and amongst those building Gittip, see: https://medium.com/building-gittip/latest.

Those would be two good places to start skimming for a bigger-picture overview.

It seems like you don't really care about gamefication or usability.

I care. :-)

I'm not spending attention on it right now because we've decided to spend our attention on Infrastructure right now, and out of the corner of my eye I see that we're still growing steadily enough that I haven't hit the panic button to stop our Infrastructure work yet.

Does that start to give you some context? :-)

[traverseda]

Yeah, that's perfect. Thanks. I'll have to read through all that in the morning.

[Changaco]

Closing in favor of #2521.