Show your Work: September 2016
This month our focus was on polish.
There is a common saying amongst developers that the first 80% of a project takes 20% of the time and the final 20% takes the other 80%. We are definitely feeling this and have come up with a term to describe it — the slog of polish.
The slog of polish is all about the little things. The things you can’t quite put your finger on as a user, but somehow get the feeling that care and attention has been taken.
It’s the 5 cent slice of orange at the end of a $100 meal. The autofocusing of a form so that you can start typing immediately. A hot towelette on an airplane. The auto opening of a menu after hovering over it for a few seconds. It’s the stuff that takes you from saying “meh” to “wow” and sharing it with all your friends.
We have long been fed up with bad clunky software that users dread to use. And now that we are starting to add the little extra touches to Kwoosh we are happy to see our vision come to life.
Inline Forms
Up until this point we only had popover forms to enter tasks and screens. This month we finished designing the inline forms to allow you to quickly add tasks and screens in the same place as where you’re viewing tasks/screens.
This was long overdue and has already made a big impact on how quickly you can add new items. With the increased space for the form we can now start to add in the additional features we want to for the tasks/screens and start to expand the possible uses.
This also gave us a lot of areas to delight users with the “little things”. We decided to make the color picker automatically change the background color when you clicked it so that users can see the effect immediately. This makes the whole interface feel really responsive and joins the rest of the things we’ve done to make Kwoosh feel and behave fast.
Being able to add multiple tasks fast was always a big goal for me personally, so we then added the simple step of autofocusing the user’s’ cursor back into the task field after they submit a task so that you can just type, hit return to submit and then start typing right away. A single line of code, but it makes a huge difference in how the UI feels.
Edit Forms
With the inline forms designed we could then use the same design for editing tasks in place. Clicking an edit icon now transforms the task/screen into an edit form and has the same familiarity as the inline add form.
We noticed that the new edit icon was interfering with the UI when you reordered items, so once again we added a little feature to hide the icon whilst you’re dragging the item and then show it again once you drop it.
Permissions
With the addition of editing we had to go back and upgrade our permission structure so that we could easily control if somebody could edit a task or not. We built out a fine grained permission list that is now expandable for our future needs. We will likely never expose the full permission system, as it would be too complex, but we have built the option into the core product so that we have the choice later on.
This month we will start to add our first users and gather feedback on what we have so far. We will also be looking into some optimizations to ensure that pages still load fast if you have a lot of data to show.
Kwoosh is a software project management tool we have been building in the open over the past year. You can continue reading our journey, join our mailing list to get updates about when we launch or follow us on twitter @kwoosh.
What are you working on? We’d love to talk with you about it.
