Users as designers
HogBay software (aka Jesse Grosjean), maker of the fantastic WriteRoom, has an idea to build a lightweight Getting Things Done app, called TaskPaper (a brilliant product name, don't you think?).
TaskPaper is interesting for a number of reasons (clutter-free GTD, simplicity and lack of 'SUV' features as product differentiation come to mind), but the thing that really caught my eye was the highly intelligent conversation in the forum between Jesse and his (future) TaskPaper customers.
The people in the forum are basically helping to refine the approach and functions of the application while it's in the design phase - there's a significant amount of careful thought and suggestions, and it really feels like TaskPaper will be imprived because of the time and thought gone into the forum posts. In fact there's one point where the feedback has clearly improved Jesse's ideas (relating to nuances of how text will be stored.)
It's a real inspiration for my personal goal to get our forums up and running when we finally get to public beta, I hope we'll be as lucky to get the level of insight and contribution as Hogbay has from it's interested users.
Comments
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Posted by: Matthew Brindley | June 26, 2008 6:01 AM