How Can We Make ConceptShare Even More Fun?
{ December 13th, 2007 }
We’re getting ready to do another round of user experience improvements on ConceptShare. We’d like to hear from you about how we can make our tool even more fun for you. Please let us know:
- Where a simple message would help
- Where you’re not sure what to do
- Where the flow of the experience feels broken
- Where something feels painful
Please feel free to mention anything and everything that comes to mind.
We care a lot about making ConceptShare a breeze to use. Most of the improvements that went into our recent V2 launch had to do with making the experience smoother. Since then we’ve already made several improvements based on requests from our community. Your help today will help us make it even better in the near future.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our web feed!
Categories: Community, ConceptShare ~ ~ Trackback
December 13th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Some wording issues that I would like to see fixed, otherwise I think conceptshare is perfect!
‘edit concept’ in the context menu of the media pool, and ‘replace’ above the concept do the same thing, so why different names?
All of my clients don’t realize that ’save concept’ means download, they always ask me how they can download things.
Also, sometimes I would like to be able to minimize or hide all comments - especially when using a small screen.
December 13th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
LOVE this app. Maybe it’s just me, but it hit me squarely between my eyes! Great job. Hard to even find anything critical about it.
- Integration with basecamp and gtalk
- Ability to show all comments at once, or make it more intuitive that there are more comments.
- when clicking edit workspace, then editing feilds, their state should save when moving from one tab to the next, but not commit until the user clicks update. And update buttons shouldn’t move me to next tab. that’s what “next” does also, should probably just go ahead and call it “Apply” instead of “update”. In the same screen, I clicked add member and the app froze. (I’m on FF 2.0.0.11 on mac 10.5)
good luck, and I’ll be a paying customer, recommending it to everyone I know!!
December 13th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I’ve been using ConceptShare for about 1 month now and i’ve seen the overhaul from V1 to V2 and it’s really come a long way. That being said, I am a Web/UI designer and so naturally I have some suggestions:
- There needs to be a good way to hide all the comments so you can just look at the concepts. If there is a way, I haven’t found it yet.
- I still have a hard time seeing which comments i’ve read and which comments I haven’t. It seems to make comments with new data in a bold font, but it also makes them bold when I post something new too. This is a hard thing to accomplish, but I think it’s pretty critical.
- My clients want to download the concepts, and since they aren’t the PSD files I want to let them, but I can’t do that without setting them as an administrator. It would be nice to have permission settings for a workspace.
- The print summary feature is very useful, but since i’ve upgraded to V2 it hasn’t worked for me at all. I would love to see more options in this area of the app too. A great way to make a to-do list from all the input.
- Another comment I get from clients is that they would like to see previous versions of concepts. It would be great to see an option for that somewhere.
- Something that bugs me all the time is, once i’ve made a change I want to mark a comment as completed. I cannot narrow down my comments without deleting them. This is something that i’m sure a lot of people find potentially annoying. It’s nice to go back and view the old (completed) comments later, but it stays there.
- Approval manager is somewhat confusing to me and my clients and I still haven’t managed to use it correctly. Watching the training video on it helped.
- I would be very excited if this could handle uploading PSD concepts and/or automatically converting them to an image. I am always having to save copies of the files when it would be so much more convenient to just select the PSD.
- I would like to have branding on my account even though I don’t pay for the most expensive account type. Since I use this as my main client communication tool I feel like I should have a little more control over it. I wouldn’t mind keeping the ConceptShare logo on there somewhere if I could also upload my logo and possibly change a color or two. I cannot afford the most expensive account, and it doesn’t make sense for my current needs, but that is one feature that I would very much appreciate.
- Sales wise, when I was trying this out the amount of concepts and workspaces was hardly enough for me to try it out with a client and see if it works for me.
- This is just the designer in me talking, but it would be cool to see a little more work on the icons. Some of them seem really basic and some are sort of jaggy. Also, the scroll bars don’t really match with the dark UI.
That’s all I can think of for now. You guys have done a great job filling a need that I have had for a long time. Keep up the great work and thanks for the great support!
December 13th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Wow, great responses - thanks everyone! Please keep them coming
Danny, the issue you mentioned with the app freezing has to do with Flash and the lightbox/popup in Firefox on Mac. The dev team is working on it as we speak. In the meantime it should work fine in Safari.
December 13th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Thanks for all the wonderful insight; it will only help us make the product better for you. Figured I’d run through some of the comments and make a few comments of my own. I would welcome those that read this to try out the Event window in the workspace (Window -> Events), if you haven’t found it already. We are hoping to make this visible by default but it is a rather daunting window at the moment for users upgrading to V2.
Peter:
- Chris has fixed the ‘edit concept’ and renamed it to ‘replace concept’.
- Chris will be changing the ’save concept’ to ‘download concept’ in order to make it more intuitive.
- The ‘Hide Comment’ feature was removed from V2 (it was in V1) and we are going to put it back in. We have received many requests for this feature to come back.
Danny:
- At ConceptShare we have a lot of great ideas for integrations with various software and we welcome any additions. BaseCamp was already on the list but I will add GTalk to the list as well.
- Ability to show all comments at once, or make it more intuitive that there are more comments.
- I will definitely look into the update button being changed to “Apply” and staying on the same “tab” within the workspace. The not saving when changing tabs is an issue as each “tab” is a separate page altogether.
- As noted by Will there currently is an issue with lightboxes, FireFox, Mac, and Flash which we are working on resolving.
Josh:
- As with Peter’s comment the “Hide Comment” feature will be re-introduced shortly.
- If you want your clients to download concepts you can go into the “Edit Workspace” section in the web-manager and check off the “Allow All Users To Download Concepts” option, then they will be able to download them without Admin rights.
- I just tested the print summary and it worked for me. Are you receiving an error? What other kind of options do you want to see in this area?
- Versioning/Revisioning is something we’ve wanted to implement as well and is definitely on the list.
- PSD is something we are actually looking into right now along with a handful of other formats, we will keep you posted.
Any comments I didn’t directly didn’t address will be taken into consideration.
Cheers!
December 14th, 2007 at 8:22 am
Thanks for the update Matthew, great to see conceptshare continually updating and evolving.
Versioning/Revisioning would be a very welcome addition!
December 14th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
@Matthew
Re:print summary:
-Clicking the print button on the concept does nothing
-File-> Print Summary returns a blank window (http://dznr.org/pv9q)
- Same thing with Workspace->Print Summary
I would like to see ways to mark comments as complete so that you can print out the summary like a task list, or at least filter out comments from before/after a certain date.
re:Hide Comment
It would be great if you hide a comment that it stays hidden until you call it back. It seems like in the V1 hide comment it would just pop right back up if you came back to it. Some sort of work there would be cool.
You guys have done a fabulous job on getting the feedback, but it’s still hard to get that feedback into a list for the designer. (My concepts are getting commented like crazy, and it gets hard to keep track of progress other than deleting comments that have already been taken care of)
December 17th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Josh,
Apparently the print summary was not working in Safari due to an issue in the browser with percentage based heights. Regardless, I have fixed the problem and should be live within the next day or so. Thanks for the screenshot, it was great insight into the problem you were having.
December 17th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
FYI, to those that requested the “Hide Comment” feature, we have great news, it will be included in tonight’s update. Enjoy!
December 18th, 2007 at 4:33 am
The hide comment feature is very nicely implemented, just noticed it today.
Thanks for all the hard work!
December 18th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Good job with the new hide comment. Looks/works great.
December 21st, 2007 at 2:38 am
Great service! I just joined to CorelDrawConceptShare…
BTW, there really should be PNG format insted of lousy compressed JPEG when you importing concepts from URL.
December 21st, 2007 at 11:25 am
Hey FataL,
I have updated the engine to use png instead of jpg files. This change will go out with tonights update.
Chris
January 27th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Screencasts. It would be great to have some generic screen casts that contributers (in my case customers) could watch to get a good feel of what concept share is about and how to use it. People tend to use the basic commenting feature, but the rest of the features are lost to everyone and I can’t always train my clients on it.