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Major Redesign for General Improvement

September 27th, 2011

Mikael Roos

At Flowdock, we’ve been mulling over user experiences and interface quite a bit lately. A while back, you might have spotted an experiment we did and wrote about in a blog post to remove the dashboard. Well, just now you might have noticed something else. Like the dashboard gone. Yup, we removed it.

Where are the user list and the mentions?!

Check out the top right corner of your screen. There’s a people icon. Click it and you’ll see the user list. The same dropdown now holds your status, and the editing controls for it.

Next, check out the little speech bubble icon. Click it, and you’ll see the mentions list. A badge bubble will emerge when there are unread stuff in there.

So, what’s new then?

Well, we added a third dropdown. All the way in the topmost, rightmost corner, we have the flows dropdown to give you quick access to your other flows. We still recommend you keep all the different flows you actively use open in different tabs at all times. We’re working on a better UI for using several flows at once.

More! We Need More!

Well, we also added full-screen chat. It’s actually pretty cool. When you resize the window narrower and narrower, the chat finally snaps into full-screen mode and the left side collapses. The same thing happens if you drag the chat wide from the middle separator. When widening the window or narrowing the chat, the left side expands. Snappity-snap!

<< Click to enlarge

One more! Please!

Well, we did add color-coding to the speech bubbles which are show in the chat when commenting on Team Inbox items. The colors are coded to the individual Team Inbox items, so it’s much easier to keep track on multiple “threads” of conversation.

That’s it! Let us know how we did in the comments, or via .

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Style Me Pretty with Flowdock

September 7th, 2011

Anni Rautio

Style Me Pretty is a style savvy wedding blog, that loves Flowdock. We talked with the technical lead of the team, Tait Larson, to get a behind-the-scenes look at how Flowdock helps Style Me Pretty operate smoothly.

Launched in 2007, Style Me Pretty is on a mission to bring chic and sophisticated wedding to the masses.

Bringing in over 500.000 visitors and 13 million page views each month, Style Me Pretty has grown leaps and bounds from its beginnings. The team has expanded from Abby and Tait to about 15 people scattered all over the United States.

Tracking Media inside Flowdock

Keeping the blog up and running and staying on top of all social networks requires a fleet of technical and non-technical staff. They are located all over the United States, yet they work seamlessly together, and they work fast.

How? With Flowdock.

“Flowdock is just quicker, cleaner and better than other tools around!”, Tait says.

On any given day, Style Me Pretty needs to follow up on the hottest trends, see what’s new, and keep Style Me Pretty active on all social networks, like Twitter. To ensure their fingers are constantly on the pulse of what’s new & pretty, Style Me Pretty tracks social media and website activity through Flowdock’s real time notifications – keeping both internal and external communication timely.

All team on the same page

The entire Style Me Pretty team uses Flowdock on a daily basis – keeping people in constant commutation and making all tasks that much more efficient. Editors may ask the tech team for advice, and the tech team can keep everyone updated on any issues that might arise.

Flowdock is used as a 101 tech support channel inside the team – everyone always knows who’s online, and status updates tell who’s working on what.

Another key function is the social aspect. “The team is spread across many states, and by chatting in Flowdock, the team members connect and gather around a “virtual water cooler”", adds Tait.

“Since we started with Flowdock, the team has more than doubled in size. Flowdock has helped us avoid communication hiccups as we grow!”

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Flowdocking the Uxebu Way

September 2nd, 2011

Anni Rautio

Wolfram KriesingMeet Wolfram Kriesing, Co-Founder of uxebu, a quickly growing JavaScript company.

In their own words, uxebu is not just another web and mobile app developer. Rather, they go head first to tackle mobile challenges of all kinds, from commercial ventures to open source projects.

Uxebu was kicked off in 2008 between 3 guys. Originally from Munich, Germany, the uxebu team has grown into a collection of developers spread across Munich, Amsterdam and Ohio.

To stay on top of their game regardless of timezones, closely-knit teamwork is a must for this agile startup. When it comes to collaboration, uxebu trusts Flowdock’s expertise.

Less email, more conversation

The uxebu team was never a big fan of email. Before entering the world of Flowdock, uxebu relied on Skype and Skype chat. While Flowdock hasn’t eliminated the need for Skype calls, especially with external clients, what has changed is the way the team works together.

In Flowdock, uxebu has created separate flows, or project rooms, for each project they are working on.

“We don’t have all team members working actively on all projects, but still everyone has free access to each project’s information. If I need to follow up on a project in which I don’t have an active role, I can still access the project flow anytime I want to find the update I need”, Wolfram says.

The team discusses the everyday issues and customer updates in a general flow, but project-based flows are all about hard work. Discussion revolves around work-related details, the real techie stuff.

Highlighting the important info

What makes uxebu’s work more efficient, is how they use #tags and @mentions. Working across timezones can create bottlenecks in development and communication, but Flowdock keeps you notified even when you’re asleep.

Wolfram gets highlighted in Flowdock

“When I open Flowdock in the morning, the comments that are important to me get highlighted. Skype just can’t do this!”, says Wolfram. “Skype’s notification was too noisy for me. In Flowdock, I have customized what types of notifications ping me.”

Connecting team members around the clock smooths out the software development process. All work related discussions take place on Flowdock, making it simple for everyone to stay on top of their game.

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Experiment: Get Rid of the Dashboard!

July 29th, 2011

Mikael Roos

Disclaimer: We have recently decided to dedicate more time for experimentation at Flowdock. This is the first big experiment.

The bottom line is, Flowdock is a team inbox (Influx) with chat. And awesome tagging mechanisms and super-fast search. That got us thinking. Why is it that a dashboard with relatively little content is the first thing users see when we have other more important things to show, like Infux? So we thought, let’s get rid of the dashboard!

» See the entire screen

The dashboard contains elements that are essential for Flowdock users. We need to come up with new places for those functionalities.

  1. Recognizability – We use the name of the flow and company as the title of the Dashboard. Even without this experiment, we need to improve the recognizability of the flows, maybe let users add an icon for each flow and show that in the UI as well as use it as a favicon (shown as the browser tab’s icon). We decided to add a drop-down to the chat header which would take you to other flows. When not selected, it could show the name of the flow.
  2. Messages for you – The Dashboard lists any messages where someone mentioned your name or added your @username tag. That’s vital information so we need to add it somewhere. We decided to go with a Facebook/Google+ style message dropdown and add it above the chat.
  3. User list – The user list needs to be moved as well. We had lengthy discussions wether it’s a must to be able to see the list all the time. The answer we got to was no. We’ll bundle it up with the notifications

Also, we sometimes show system notifications on the Dashboard. Things like, “Install the Google Chrome app” and other stuff. We decided to bundle it up with the new messages dropdown.

One more thing we had to consider was that the Dashboard icon contains the Flowdock logo which gives the whole UI a distinctive Flowdock look. We should either keep the logo there and make sure no one mistakes it for an app icon or just drop it and try to maybe use it in another part of the UI.

The Result

The first sketches showed real promise. We were happy to see the Dashboard gone. There was some massive refactorings required to get the user list and notifications functionalities extracted from the dashboard and into the chat. We worked hard!

Here you can see what we ended up with showing the same elements 1-3 as above. It’s still kind of rough around the edges, but we’re pretty happy with the results of this 1-day dev excercise!

This way the user can focus better on what’s going on by generally always keeping Influx open. We’ll add badges and other visual cues to the new icons to show you how many new notifications you have, how many people are online at the moment etc. The flows dropdown will give you direct access to the Account page as well as logging out.

Looking For Feedback

What do you think? How do you feel about the departure of the Dashboard? Let us know in the comments, via Twitter or . We need your opinions!

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Designing a Better First-Time UX at Flowdock

July 12th, 2011

Anni Rautio

Using a new product for the first time is not always a bliss. For us at Flowdock the flow has become a way of life. We eat our on dog food, and love it, but sometimes we can get blinded by our own user experience. On the flip side, feedback is another thing we love. We’ve received lots of it, but now we’re hungry for more. First-timers, we need your help! We want the first-time user experience in Flowdock to be as seamless as possible. During this sprint, 90% of our team effort focuses on creating a happier first-time user experience. We call this the FUX.

We aim for a blink-of-an-eye, harmonious FUX-experience by:

  • clearly communicating “what Flowdock really is”, and
  • designing the flow in a way that makes a FUXie say: “this tool is very intuitive and easy to understand”

And all this, in just a blink. If you sign up to Flowdock today, this is how it looks like:

Admittedly, not very clear nor intuitive. We need your advice! Whether you’re a pro or a new-comer on Flowdock, or just want to contribute, let us know how we could improve the FUX -experience.

  1. What instructions were missing the first time you entered your flow?
  2. What was made difficult to understand?
  3. Was it easy to get your team mates on board?
  4. Why would you (or not) recommend Flowdock for other teams to use?

Simply: what would make you say “Flowdock is very easy to use”?

Help us make Flowdock better: you can comment below, or email us at .

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