Posts Tagged ‘agile’ Blog Index

I heard a great interview today on the radio. It was with Warren Berger about his new book Glimmer. The book is about design, specifically the impact design has on everything we do. Berger emphasized that good design is an iterative process – constantly evolving your ideas by getting feedback from colleagues and other consumers of your work.

There is an exciting application to creating the optimal site experience in the online world, and probably an obvious one to many designers – in order to remain at the forefront, it’s critical to constantly evolve and update our sites to continue engaging loyal visitors and generate new traffic.

But how do we get the most accurate picture of what our audience wants? Looking beyond site analytics and third party reviews, is there a way to engage visitors directly, not measuring them by the number of clicks, downloads or time on site, but instead by listening to what they have to say?

What if we just ask them?

“Tell me one thing I can do to improve my site for the next time you visit?”

“What topics should I write about?”

“How did you hear about our site and would you tell a friend? Why/why not?”

etc…

Make it easy for your visitors to share their thoughts and you’ll get a great complement to site analytics and the other input you may get.  One idea is to give people a simple feedback box on your site where they can share with you – make it anonymous to encourage participation (some people may be turned off if their comments are made public).

Designing, and re-designing your site experience based on ongoing feedback from the people who actually use it could be a great way to efficiently grow engagement and loyalty.

Note: the radio show was on Toronto’s Classical 96.3FM.

Tags: agile, anonymous, blog, business development, change, constructive feedback, design, Feedback, Feedback Box, Glimmer, honest feedback, usability, User Experience, Warren Berger

Business Development

32380 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/improve-your-site-by-giving-visitors-a-voice/Improve+your+site+by+giving+visitors+a+voice2009-11-05+19%3A26%3A12Jesse+Goldman

Cool updates to share with you this week: You can now tag your groups and your TouchBase actions with skills.

We’ve got Skills

When you create a group, tag it with the skills you want the group to help you develop. Here’s why: When you go to ask a question to the group, Rypple will suggest questions relevant to the skills you tagged your group with. Don’t forget to add skills to your existing groups.

For premium users, TouchBase has got skills too. When you and your manager are choosing the three specific actions you’re going to complete, tag your actions with skills. Just like your groups, Rypple will suggest questions based on those skills. This will help you ask the right questions so you get the right feedback to complete your actions!

Stay tuned for next weeks notes. Same bat channel, same bat time!

Tags: agile, bottom-up, change, Development, kaizen, learning, lessons, Release Notes, User Experience

Community Marketing

31940 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/whats-new-this-week-nov-3rd/What%27s+New+this+Week+at+Rypple%3A+Nov.+3rd2009-11-04+20%3A18%3A13Nathaniel+Rottenberg

Another busy week! Three cool new features to tell you about: Share your feedback with your advisers when you take action, edit and delete plans, and the new feedback box

Take Action and Share your Feedback

When you take action, you can now share the feedback you’ve received with your advisers. This is a great way to show your advisers why you’re taking a particular action. Rypple will send your advisers an email with the shared feedback and the action you’re taking, and it will also appear in their feed. Sharing your feedback is also a great way to help your advisers learn and benefit. So the next time you respond to a feedback request and you think “that was a great question, I should ask that” you may learn the results without having to ask it yourself!

Edit Your Plans

Just last week, we launched Feedback Plans. A plan is a series of Rypple questions, curated by your fellow users and designed to guide your personal development efforts with the click of a button. Based on user feedback, we’ve iterated quickly and added the ability to edit the plans you create. This allows you to add or remove questions after you’ve created and committed to your plan.

Feedback Box

Many users have told us that it would be awesome if they could collect feedback from their website or blog. The new feedback box allows you to get feedback right on your website without needing a forum or a comment section. If you want to give it a try for yourself all you have to do is:

1. Sign up for a free Rypple account here (or login if you already have one)
2. Ask a question and select the “Create a widget to embed” option
3. Copy the widget code into your site (but don’t forget to click the “Ask Now” button before you do)

Check out Austin Tam’s post “Get Your Own Feedback Box” to learn more and see who else is using it.

Tags: agile, change, Development, Feedback, kaizen, learning, New Features, process, product, reflection, Release Notes, Rypple, usability, User Experience

Community Marketing

30560 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/whats-new-this-at-rypple-oct-29th/What%27s+New+This+Week+at+Rypple%3A+Oct+28th2009-10-28+20%3A37%3A15Nathaniel+Rottenberg

Yesterday, our co-CEOs Daniel and David demoed the new version of Rypple at HR Tech. It was a great success! Thank you to everyone who was at the demo or gave great shout outs over Twitter. Stay tuned for the full details about our trip to HR Tech in upcoming posts.

Over the past week we made some big changes to get the new version of  Rypple ready for the big demo. All the features that make Rypple great can now be found on three simple pages: Feedback, Plans and Questions, and My Advisers.

Rypple’s New Look

We’ve changed the design of Rypple, and we think it looks great. It’s crisp, clean, and much easier to navigate!

Feedback

Rypple is all about getting actionable feedback from groups of people who you know. So, we re-thought Rypple to make these groups central to your experience. Your Feedback page is where you create new groups, manage existing ones, see the plans you’re doing with each group, and review the feedback you’ve received.

Plans and Questions

A Feedback Plan provides helpful structure and guidance as you strive to improve. A plan is a series of Rypple questions, curated by your fellow users and designed to get you on the right track with the click of a button. Think of plans as feedback workouts assembled by the world’s best personal trainers. We’re building communities around these plans, and we’re looking for community leaders who’d like to share their insights and help create more plans. If you’d like to get involved, leave a comment below.

My Advisers

Your My Advisers page is, well, a list of your advisers (we told you that we were making Rypple simple!). The new design of this page makes it’s much easier to sort through your contacts and find who you’re looking for. You can import all your contacts at once from Gmail, Yahoo, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Vcard or you can pick specific people by adding there email address manually.

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BIG changes this week, and BIG plans for the future. We are constantly trying to improve by learning from what we’ve already done. So, what do you think of the new look and functionality of Rypple? Stay tuned for next weeks notes! Same bat channel, same bat time.

Tags: agile, bottom-up, Development, Features, lessons, process, product, Release Notes, usability

Community Marketing

24780 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/whats-new-this-week-at-rypple-oct-1st/What%27s+New+This+Week+at+Rypple%3A+Oct+1st2009-10-02+21%3A46%3A48Nathaniel+Rottenberg

On October 1st, Daniel and David will be demoing Rypple at HR Tech as part of the Cool New Technologies in HR Series. Sweet! With that date in mind we’ve been working full steam ahead. Here’s what we’ve accomplished in the past week: a new external homepage, a helpful signup wizard, and new profile pages.

New Homepage

Although we thought the last version of the homepage looked great, and we got a lot of great feedback, we knew that we could do better. This version of the homepage is much clearer, and does a much better job at explaining what Rypple is all about. On the new page you’ll find samples of some helpful questions suggested by our users, awesome RyppleTV videos, and a smiley face that you won’t be able to resist.

Signup Wizard

The signup wizard guides you through four simple steps; fill out your profile information, set a goal, create a group, and create a question. Simple. Once you’re done, you’re all set to find out what people really think.

New Profile Page

We’re making Rypple more social by creating profile pages. Your profile page will include your Rypple stats as well as who you give and get feedback from. Your advisers can also give you general anonymous feedback right from your profile page.

Stay tuned for next week’s notes! Same bat channel, same bat time.

Tags: agile, Development, kaizen, learning, Release Notes, Workplace

Community Marketing

24100 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/whats-new-this-week-at-rypple-sept-24/What%27s+New+This+week+at+Rypple%3A+Sept+242009-09-24+18%3A27%3A36Nathaniel+Rottenberg

Before joining Rypple I had never heard of Agile, but since, it has entirely changed my view of development. Agile has allowed the Rypple team to quickly change directions with different aspects of our site. Over the last few weeks we’ve constantly been modifying and refining the homepage.

Alan Atlas recently posted to the RallyDev Agile Blog comparing the Agile and Waterfall models.

So what is this ride down the waterfall like?
Well, it starts off very exciting. You get in the boat and head toward the waterfall. There’s never any question of where the waterfall is, you just go the way everybody else is pointing. It starts off kind of fast, but it’s a fun kind of fast and everybody in the boat is up for the challenge. Then, as the current gets going to about 40 miles an hour, you decide to change direction. Well, that doesn’t go so well, does it? Zooooop, and you’re over the falls just like that. Waterfalls are not about change.

Alan then compares Waterfall to Agile using the Pond metaphor.

Now let’s move over to the Pond approach:
A project in Pond is represented by taking a boat out onto the pond and getting to a different side of the pond from where you’re starting out. Did I say a different side? Whoa, that’s not very goal-oriented, is it? Well, yes and no.

Check out the rest of the post on the RallyDev Agile Blog.

Tags: agile, alan atlas, development model, Feedback, jordan satok, metaphor, rallydev, Rypple, waterfall

Marketing

23250 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/a-metaphor-for-agile-the-opposite-of-waterfall-is-pond/A+Metaphor+for+Agile+-+The+Opposite+of+Waterfall+is+Pond+2009-09-22+14%3A06%3A52Jordan+Satok

What’s new at Rypple? So sweet of you to ask! Here’s the brief: A “nothing to add” button for when you don’t know have a response to a feedback request, and enterprise and team users can now create corporate groups.

Nothing to Add

Sometimes you receive a request for feedback and you simply aren’t able to respond due to lack of context, or maybe you want to take some time to think about your response. No problem: click ‘nothing to add’. Once you do, the asker will be able to see (without personally identifying you of course) that some of their advisers have decided to hold off responding for the time being and you can still come back and respond later if you like!

Corporate Groups

Ever wanted to easily send a Rypple feedback request to your marketing or development team? Wouldn’t it be great if your company could setup distributions lists in Rypple that you could easily use when requesting that type of feedback? Welcome to Corporate Groups! Corporate Groups allows your Rypple Administrator to set up groups of users based on your existing workplace structure. Accessible on the Team or Enterprise account, this feature will make it easier for you and your team members to ask the right group of people for feedback!

Stay tuned for next week’s notes, same bat time, same bat channel!

Tags: agile, Development, Features, learning, lessons, process, product, Release Notes, startup, User Experience, Workplace

Community Marketing

22460 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/whats-new-this-week-at-rypple-sept-16th/What%27s+New+this+Week+at+Rypple%3A+Sept+16th2009-09-17+21%3A02%3A14Nathaniel+Rottenberg

Wired Magazine recently published the article The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine, which focuses on the success of the Flip Video cameras.  I was struck by the valuable lesson to be learned from the success of the camera: “quick and dirty over slow and polished.” Keeping it simple, cheap, and getting it in the consumers hands quickly is much more valuable than making it perfect.

An interesting excerpt from the article:

The Flip’s success stunned the industry, but it shouldn’t have. It’s just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher.

So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished.

Jonathan Kaplan and Ariel Braunstein, the creators of the Flip Video, noticed that most people only use their expensive camcorders for shooting simple video. So, they made a  cheap camera that only shoots simple video! The Flip Video camera is far from the best camcorder available. It’s not even close. But it’s the most successful. These little cameras cornered 17% of the U.S. camcorder market.

The success of this camera demonstrates a powerful lesson: a product does not have to be ‘the best’, but simply good enough. ‘Cool’ extras that aren’t essential to accomplishing the product’s central goal won’t necessarily increase the value of your product and may only complicate and increase cost. “Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.” Keeping it simple, cheap, and getting it in the consumers hands quickly is much more valuable than making it perfect.

We follow the Agile development process, which stresses quick iterations and getting new features to users as quick as possible. With Agile, your product may not be perfect the first time your users see it, but it will be good enough. It’s the 80/20 rule, get it 80% complete, get it out, and figure out the last 20% as you go.

One of our goals this month is to simplify Rypple and focus on our core strength; getting you feedback. We too fell victim to adding ‘cool features’ that were not really necessary. Marg Campbell, one of our trusted advisers, described Rypple, in her Rypple TV video, as “quick, dirty, and to the point!” We’re keeping this great line in mind every time we think of releasing a new feature!

Tags: agile, business development, Development, Flip Video, process, product, reflection

Community Marketing

21161 commenthttp://rypple.com/blog/the-triumph-of-good-enough-tech/The+Triumph+of+Good+Enough+Tech2009-09-17+20%3A14%3A53Nathaniel+Rottenberg

John Baldoni, one of the world’s top leadership gurus, points out that:

1. knowing what your employees really think is integral to cultivating good ideas, and,
2. reporting back on the impact of employee ideas is the key to getting more good ideas.

Fair enough…but surfacing employee thoughts and sentiments is one thing. Turning them into a tangible plan of action is quite another.

In fact, tons of great ideas are destined to be non-starters because we often don’t understand the process and barriers to acting on them.  We didn’t realize this, but it turns out that Rypple can help to uncovering barriers as well as solicit ideas.

Here’s an example:

The other day I watched  Kevin Schlabach on RyppleTV.  Kevin’s a project coordinator charged with driving innovative ideas and thinking at his company.  Kevin talked about using Rypple to solicit feedback and new ideas.

What was unexpected was that Kevin was using Rypple as a platform to uncover barriers to implementing ideas – cool!

He described how people were providing focused, constructive feedback on new ideas, but they were also appending their feedback with comments like:

“your idea is good…but it would never happen in our culture!“

NEVER happen in our culture you say!? Now we’re getting somewhere!

Not only had Kevin been able to identify a good, actionable solution to a problem, but he now had:

1. the basis for asking follow-up questions to drive his good ideas forward
2. a tool that would allow him to find out what people REALLY thought about the barriers associated with them by asking things like:

• “Why won’t the idea work in our culture?”
• “Who do you think would object the most to this idea?”
• “What would we have to do in order to bring this idea about?”

We love hearing stories of users like Kevin, but more importantly we love learning how we can help people and organizations use feedback to really drive themselves and their businesses forward.

Thanks Kevin!

Tags: agile, business development, Corporate Culture, employees, Feedback, People, Rypple, sentiments, Workplace

Product & Community

22070 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/that-will-never-work-in-our-culture/%22That+will+never+work+in+our+culture%21%222009-09-15+18%3A07%3A34David+Priemer

What’s new at Rypple? Well I’m glad you asked! Here’s the brief: Your advisers can comment on the actions you’re taking, we’ll let your advisers know when you’ve completed an action, and we’ve changed your My Network page to My Groups where you can manage all of your groups.

Action Comments

As we saw two weeks ago when we launched Commit to Action, taking action based on your advisers’ feedback is a great way to improve. But what happens if you take the wrong action, or you decide to take an action that is less effective than what your advisers would recommend? You trust your advisers to provide expert feedback and now they can use the same expertise to comment on the action you’re going to take. All they have to do is reply to the email that lets them know what action you’ll be taking and provide their thoughts. Feedback on feedback. Sweet!

Closing the Loop

Let your advisers know when you’ve completed an action to close the loop and show them that you appreciate their feedback.  Full circle feedback at last!

Groups Reborn

The My Network page has a new name: My Groups. Check out last week’s notes to learn a little more about groups and their benefits. Last week’s changes to Groups were a big step forward, but we’re agile and like to make things better quickly! We’ve improved the contact organizer so it’s easier to sort through your contacts. And, by popular demand, the contacts page now includes a search field!

When you send out a feedback request, the feedback you receive is organized on your My Feedback page. Groups works a little differently. Each group has it’s own My Feedback-style page. Every question you’ve asked that group, the feedback they’ve sent you, comments, and the actions you’re going to take are organized on a page dedicated to that particular group.

Big changes this week! As always, I’ll be back next week to keep you in the loop. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Tags: agile, business development, constructive feedback, Development, Features, Feedback, kaizen, learning, lessons, Release Notes, usability, User Experience

Community Marketing

20940 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/whats-new-this-week-at-rypple-sept/What%27s+New+This+Week+at+Rypple%3A+Sept+4th2009-09-08+18%3A15%3A46Nathaniel+Rottenberg