Exploring Agility: A New UI

I love working in a startup. I get to interact directly with our audience on a regular basis.  I also get to respond to what they have to say in near real-time.

We’ve wanted to play around with the UI in our advanced creator for quite a while. The problem was that there were just too many other projects going on.  Well we got some candid feedback from a user (something we, and most likely every startup, value incredibly) and decided it was time.  Two days later (it would have been one, but I broke something…), the new UI was out there to play with.

We decided to get rid of the characters that represented different actions in the UI and go to a more traditional IDE look and feel.  The basic reason being that it’s hard enough to drive adoption without presenting a new paradigm for user interaction.  The new UI makes things much more visible and accessible:

We also highlighted a lot of our community features through the Help tab on the right.  Ideally this provides the resources our users need to build things as well as generating more of this type of interaction.

There are a ton of  cool things about this whole process.  First, it help drives engagement and loyalty.  Second, it encourages additional feedback.  Third, if it doesn’t work out, we get to try something else out as quickly as we did this.  I’ve worked at a couple of places where it was nearly impossible to turn around big changes like this on a rapid basis.

So if any of you have additional feedback on the user experience in the advanced creator, we’d love to hear it.  Feel free to use our Get Satisfaction page, the community forums, or post a comment right here on the blog.  There’s also a Google Group created by this same user that you might want to use to interact with other Sharendipity users.

What does “float” mean?

We’ve been asking the question, “Does anyone know what a float is?” Every time a user creates a new property for a game object, or a variable for a behavior, they are forced to ponder its definition.

We already know that some users don’t know what it is, and in an attempt to simplify an interface for the creative but non-technical Sharendipity users, we’ve tried to find the right words to describe various “number” properties inside Sharendipity.

• Whole numbers
• Fractional numbers

We posed the question to our Twitter and Facebook networks, and smiled when we received this reply from friend Adam Hupp…

It’s an integer that wishes it was a Real.

My favorite float factoid is the next representable floating point number can be found by interpreting the float as an int and incrementing it, e.g.

float nextFloat(float f) {
int asInt = *(int*)&f;
asInt += 1;
return *(float*)&asInt;
}

Neat, eh?”

Sounds like Adam knows what a float is… But a sister in law reported back, “I googled it and still don’t get it…” There’s a clear gap between the programmers and non-programmers, which also happens to be the sweet spot for Sharendipity.

The outcome? We’re going to try “Integer” for whole numbers and “Decimal” for fractional number properties, and also display explicit examples of each type when it is chosen.

It seems subtle, but when we’re serving the entire continuum from programmers to artists, we’d like to find a model that serves everyone. What do you think?