Good communication in a purely virtual team is essential. Over the years we have used everything from IM, Skype, Asterisk, and now Campfire. One of the great benefits of working virtually is alone time and focus. At the same time, sitting on IM all day can have an opposite effect. Today we came up with a way to use Twitter to maximize communication, while still giving us the alone time we need. First, I want to give a little history on how this evolved…
Social Software: The Dashboard
This will be the beginning of a series about social software design, strategy, and implementation. The combination of this series will be used as a follow up to our 35 page Social Networks Report from two years ago. This first post is about the use of dashboards and how they affect and motivate users.
The colorless UI design
When designing web applications the goal always seems to rely on visual beauty and the next visual design masterpiece. This may be true and have great value for some consumer applications, but the more we design, the more we realize color is best used for communication, not just aesthetics.
Project Alpha — Our latest Rails product
For the past four weeks we have been working on our next Rails product, which we internally call Project Alpha. Alpha is a hosted subversion system, making it easy for anyone to setup, browse, track, and manage Subversion repositories. Read the full post for screenshots and more details.
One week without Internet communications — productivity boost?
Last week I had a crazy idea. What if I switched off my usual things, like reddit.com, email, campfire, IM and all the other stuff that, as it seemed to me, wastes my time? At least for one week. Sounds easy, right?
