ProofHQ Blog
Updates about ProofHQ, design best practice and anything we can find to amuse you that's related to design and marketing.
Updates to the Proof Page design
We have just released some important updates to the proof page design. The aim is to make it even simpler for your reviewers to work with proofs inside ProofHQ.
One of the most common pieces of feedback that we get from customers is that they want their clients to INSTANTLY understand ProofHQ when they open a proof for the first time. This creates a design dilemma - how to make things simple for first time users, without hiding tools that more experienced users want quick access to. Mark Suster covered this subject in his recent post Building Products for Mass Adoption. Admittedly, ProofHQ is not a mass market product like Flickr or You Tube, but the principles of “Design for novices, configure for power users” still applies to a more specialist business application like ours - especially one that is used by our customers to work collaboratively with their clients.
This led us to take a look at how people new to ProofHQ react when they open their first proof. Common reactions were:
“There are too many buttons, what do I do first?”
“Why have the Add Comment and New Decision buttons disappeared?”
“How do I know that I already made a decision?”
Based on that feedback we looked at ways to cut down on the information displayed when the proof first opens and also make it clearer to users what the current status of the proof is.
The main changes are:
- Reducing the clutter in the header by having just a single row of tools and adding a tool “ribbon” that only displays when one of the tools are clicked.
- Having the sidebar minimised on opening if there are no comments on the proof.
- Changing the decision button text once a person has made a decision.
- If the person is “Read Only” showing that text instead of the Add Comment and Make Decision buttons.
- If the proof is “Locked” showing that text instead of the Add Comment and Make Decision buttons.
- We have also tidied up the “compare mode” design so that you can see the proof names at the top of the page.
This movie explains more.
February Service Level Report
Below is the monthly uptime report of Feb 2010
——————————————————
Name: ProofHQ Production
Service: HTTP
Host (port): www.proofhq.com (80)
Check period: 3 minutes
# of checks: 13,090
# of outages: 0
# of failed : 0
Uptime: 100 %
Avg. response time: 0.214 s
Release: Japanese translation, new login page, bug fixes
The latest release is a series of small fixes with the exception of the first item; Japanese translation.
- Japanese translation
- Redesign login screens
- “Workspaces shared with me”
- Admins managing Billing Admins
- Indicating mandatory fields
- Another Basecamp integration fix
- Last 10 items on the dashboard
Apologies for intermittent proof page issues
We want to apologise for any performance issues that you may have experienced on the proof pages late Thursday and Friday. Having moved and upgraded our entire hosting infrastructure a week ago we are incredibly disappointed that this happened.
The problem was human error on our part caused by incorrectly adding a session management function that was supposed to enable a user session to be split across multiple web servers. The session manager caused the proof page function to slow down intermittently. We have tracked down the issue and as at 22:00 GMT on Friday it was resolved.
Apologies again for any problems that you experienced.
Anthony Welgemoed joins ProofHQ as CTO
I would like to announce a big change at ProofHQ.
Anthony Welgemoed has joined us as CTO. Anthony is a super-sharp technologist with terrific experience with both marketing workflow and SaaS software products. He joins us from Mtivity (the last company I founded) and before that he ran a 25 person development team at Lastminute.com.
It’s perfect timing having someone of Anthony’s calibre step into the CTO role:
- Our development team is growing quickly. We have 10 people split between Poland, the UK and shortly the USA. This requires more sophisticated product road map planning and better management of day-to-day product development.
- Our core client base is growing massively. This puts pressure on us to scale our infrastructure and keep it scaleable.
- We are doing more “consulting and integration” work for Fortune 100 clients. That work needs to be completed in parallel with our core product development. This is a discipline that most SaaS companies need to manage.
- Our architecture is split between quite different technologies (Flex, PHP/MySQL, Java, Windows). That complexity needs to be managed efficiently so that the pace of product development is maintained.
- Finally, we have more partner relationships to support at a technical level.
This is a great step forward for ProofHQ. we are delighted to have Anthony join us.
Team Meetup in Wroclaw, Poland
We had one of our regular team meetups last week.
The ProofHQ team is split between the UK, Poland, Qatar, Ireland and (shortly) the US. In fact, the team in Poland are split between five cities, so they see each other as little as they do the rest of us. We all work remotely and connect every day by Skype, GoToMeeting and email.
View ProofHQ Team in a larger map
Remote working has huge advantages, but also some disadvantages. We all miss those quick end-of-day beers and the opportunity to chill out together face-to-face . To compensate we try and get together regularly in one place. The folks from Poland have been to London a few times and we have travelled to Poland, including for social events such as weddings. We are now trying to make these meetups a quarterly event and make them part of the ProofHQ “rythm” (daily scrums, fortnighly sprints, monthly releases, quarterly meetups, etc).
Last week we returned to Wroclaw, which is a historical city in south west Poland. Wroclaw was where we hired our first team member in Poland (Irek) and is one of the top technology hubs in the country. The rest of the team travelled in from Gdansk, Lodz, Lublin, the UK and Quatar.
January Service Level report
Below is the monthly uptime report of January 2010
——————————————————
Name: ProofHQ Production
Service: HTTP
Host (port): www.proofhq.com (80)
Check period: 3 minutes
# of checks: 14,340
# of outages: 1
# of failed : 1
Uptime: 99.993 %
Avg. response time: 0.229 s
Remind All function
We have added back the Remind All function with some big improvements.
Remind All can be accessed from:
- the proof sidebar (see 1 below)
- the proof Tools menu (see 2 below)
- the proof Details page in the Stage and People actions menus (see 3 below)
You can select one or more of the people on the proof. The existing proof subject/message will be copied into the Remind page so that you can edit and reuse it.
This video explains more:
Print comments - sort by comment number or page
We have added an option to the Print Comments page so that you can now sort your comments by page number as well as by comment number. The reason is that comment numbers do not always follow the page order - those darned reviewers can jump around the proof as they add comments. This new sort option lets you sort by page number then comment number.
Here is a screenshot showing where you can find the sort option.
Recent bug fixes on ProofHQ
We just fixed a number bugs:
- The “Download File” function now works on all browsers. Before there were problems downloading version 2 onwards in Internet Explorer.
- If you use the Remind or Add People functions on proofs, the existing subject and message from that proof will be copied for you to edit before sending.
- We now have pagination on the proofs list in the workspaces page. This has accelerated page load of the workspace page.
- All users can now see the Sent Email activity log in the Activity tab. This was previously only available to admins.
- If you try to upload a new proof that takes you over your proof limit you will now see a proper alert. Previously you would see a rather unhelpful “Error 500″ page.
- Links in Backup Emails now go to a page where you can download your backup Zip. Previously there was an “Error 400″ page.
- If you delete an item from a workspace it is now removed to trash. Previously it would remain visible in the workspace as well as appear in trash.
There were a number of other minor issues that were also fixed.
Thanks to all clients who let us know about issues and apologies that it took a while longer to resolve some of these:
