Three weeks in…
So, ChatterBox has been in private beta now for three weeks and things are rolling along nicely. We’ve been learning a lot since the launch to our beta users. So far the feedback has been very positive and we have been lucky to be able to attend some great events.
After our initial launch at the 140 Twitter Conference (#140tc), we were invited to attend Mass Innovation Nights. A huge thanks to Bobbie Carlton for organizing such a great event and for giving us the opportunity to participate. All I can say is that I am never going anywhere without a few ChatterBox monkeys. People love screaming monkeys. If you create a ChatterBox for the #MIN3 hash tag and the word monkey, you’ll see what I mean. I think I might need to invest in the Super Fly Monkey company!
As with all initial releases, there are some things that we need to improve in the application. I thought it might be useful to share some of these items. We’re working on planning the next release now. Aside from addressing some of the general usability items from this release (and some exciting enhancements), we want to make sure that your feedback is included. So, please send us anything you can think of and we’ll start to factor it in to our plans.
So, here’s the list of things we have found so far:
1. Expect a lot more data than you think!
So, believe or not, there happens to be quite of bit of content on Twitter. During 140tc, we opened up private beta invites for 24 hours and got about 70 users signing up to use the app. After 24 hours we found that about 10% of the users on the system had already accounted for 1.2 million conversations pulled-in from Twitter. Now for some that may not seem like much, but for us those numbers made us a little concerned. We want to have quite a few users on the system and to scale up to that amount of capacity over a short period of time will pose a challenge for us self-funded start-ups. So, we decided to make a couple of changes to the application. The first change was to put in a limit for the number of conversations a ChatterBox will pull in for that day. This helps by limiting content for very broad ChatterBoxes that may not be in use regularly. We also added an option to restart the ChatterBox conversation collection if needed.
Personally, I don’t think this solution is optimal. We’ll be improving this over the next release to give you a more “live” feel to the information and to try to take out limitations like this one from the system.
2. The workflow isn’t working out exactly as planned
We love the fact that when a conversation comes in to a ChatterBox, it’s easy to put that conversation into workflow and categorize and tag, prioritize and assign those conversations to other ChatterBox participants. The UI makes it easy to get to the conversations, respond and then update them with additional information. However, it’s not so easy to see which items you have already reviewed and also which items have been updated since you last looked at that ChatterBox. While we have a number in the ChatterBox tab for “untouched” conversations, 
it’s not all that clear what that number means. Also, in looking at the conversations, it’s not blatantly obvious which items have been updated since we present the conversations in a collapsed view. Notifications fall into the same camp. We underestimated the value of email notifications. That’s quickly become the #1 piece of feedback on our UserVoice forum. So, RSS is great, but email is better for notifications. We’ll get that addressed.
3. It’s a team app with a limited sense of team
One of the main ChatterBox features we’re proud of is the ability to collaborate with other members of a team in the management of conversations. It’s a powerful capability that let’s teams see the full trail of conversations and respond easily from a single account (or individual accounts if desired). One problem. You can’t really tell who is participating with you in the ChatterBox. If you are the admin of the ChatterBox, you can see who you have invited and who has accepted, but as a participant, the only way to really know is to look in the assignment drop-down. This will change in the next version. It was one of those oversights that will be addressed.
Well, that’s all for now. Keep the feedback rolling-in. We’re very excited to have people using the app and we’re on a mission to make sure that it provides the best user experience possible.
Thanks!
Charlie
