daytender .31 released

Mainly addressing bug fixes from user requests, fixed the social page which now loads again.  Pop up there and answer the question before it rolls over on Monday.

By request, we've also changed the regular email to have a direct link into the DailyMirror.  Enjoy!

The friendly folks at daytender.

.30 Released - New Social Page

Back when we first launched, we released a placeholder for the social section, but it didn't really have anything there.  We noticed that some users would come throughout the week just to check the social page.  It helped us realize that the idea was interesting and a draw for people, but we just didn't have anything there.  So, we ripped it out and began planning new stuff.

Now, a few months later, we're happy to re-launch the new social page.  It has a wall for users to share with each other, a question of the week, some playfulness around usage data, and pointers to who comes to the site.

The goal of the social section is to interact with like-minded people in positive, uplifting, and goal-centered ways. Please let us know how to improve it, and please help make the page a community of the types of interactions that you most want to see.

One thing that you might notice.  Today, there are tons of users with the automatically assigned usernames, which are just a string of numbers.  I highly recommend customizing your user name for interacting with others on the site.

Another new addition, a motivation quote of the week shows up on the dashboard.  Keep coming back to check it out.

Keep being awesome.
daytender

.28 Released

In this latest version we've added a whole new Resources page featuring tons of content to links that are motivating and valuable, we also bring in a lot of improvement and consistency around cross-browser support including clickable emotions wheel for non-Chrome browsers, and we've improved pop-ups quite a bit.

Behind the scenes, we've also made some changes to our admin interface to let us better keep track of and respond to user comments, stars, and errors that people hit on the site.  Now that the site's user base is growing, it's important for us to stay on top of what people are telling us.

During this upgrade, we had a database malfunction, and we accidentally lost settings for email notifications.  Some people may need to turn their settings off again.  We're not sure how it happened, and we really apologize for the mix up.

The next release is on track to bring in some new social features so that you can interact with other users in more ways than just the comments.

Keep sending us your comments and ratings so that we can keep tweaking the site to your liking.

Thanks from the Stark Raving Bits.

daytender
It's habit forming.

We goofed! Users rejoice!

I made a mistake late last night that leaked some new features to daytender.com before we were ready.  It has some important things in it:

1. Much slicker popup experiences in a few places, especially around feedback
2. The emotions wheel in the Daily Mirror is now clickable.  Click on an emotion to insert it into your write-up.  Several people asked for this, now you have it!
3. Communication mails - There's now a setting in your profile to receive (infrequent) notification mailings.  This is separate from daily mailings, so you now have more fine-grained control.

You might wonder how this mistake happened, so here's a peek under the covers.  We keep 2 versions of the site: staging and production.  On Staging, we test the changes amongst the members of Stark Raving Bits to ensure that they're ready to go live. Production is what everyone else sees, and we try to make the code as rock solid as possible on staging before we push to production.  If you ever wonder why you don't see as much from Dean, Scott, and Ed on daytender.com, it's because we use the staging site as our daily fix while ironing out as many kinks as possible.  I mistakenly pushed to production instead of staging last night when celebrating a challenging bug fix.


The good news, the oops seems to work really well, so we'll keep it live.  You get some new features even earlier than we intended.  Enjoy, and please let us know what you think.


daytender
It's habit forming.

.26 released on 3/5 - Visual enhancements

We're experimenting with iterating faster to bring you changes as we have them.  This release comes just 6 days after the release of .25.  We have 3 themes to this release:

1. Visual improvements - We tightened up the dashboard, New font and updated logo, consistent colors, custom error messages (if you hit a page error)
2. It's easier for you to know when the admin got back to one of your comments, if you have emails turned on. 
3. Improved statistics - We brought back a visualization of the time spent on DailyMirror, now as a sparkline.  Additionally, all ratings on the site now show as stars instead of text. Over time you will see more use of sparklines and tighter data visualizations.

Behind the scenes we upgraded to faster, more reliable server software, though you likely won't see much of that. Stay tuned for more fun stuff that's in the works.  We should have another release coming very shortly.  

Oh, and you might not have seen the new email format because of a bug that we had, it was only sending to a small fraction of our users.  Click this link to turn emails back on.  It's a simple 1-click from the new mail to turn them back off if you don't find them valuable, so give it a shot!

Cheers from the folks at daytender.

.25 released, bringing email enhancements

You might want to turn the emails back on.

Many people told us that our previous emails were harassments that didn't add any value.  We completely redesigned those to help keep you in touch with what's going on on the site, and as you use DailyMirror, the system will remind you of your plans and serve as a useful record for you.

Click this link to turn emails back on.  It's a simple 1-click from the new mail to turn them back off, so give it a shot!

Before and After

Check out these before and after shots to get an idea for the changes that we've made in this release of daytender.

The signin page is more attractive and themes our site better.  Don't you just want to come on in?  The first time user experience is now very streamlined to make the first experience minimallyintrusive.

The dashboard has tons of new stuff, include user stats and word clouds.

 The DailyMirror intro is now a lot more relaxing as you prepare to enter this important part of your day.

 The feedback popup now separates ratings from comments, has a graphical rating interface, and accepts multiple comments.  There's a ton more that we've done to make it even easier to provide feedback.

daytender .2 released

A lot can happen in 6 weeks.  Check out daytender to see the massive updates.  New/updated features on the site have pink stars.  Look for them and comment!

Thanks for filling out comments and leaving ratings.  We have read every one and have worked to address as many as possible.  We've had a couple of changes since the launch day, though today we're releasing tons and tons of stuff.  You might not see everything that you've asked for, though we're looking at it, and in some cases designing for it.  Please continue to provide us with your feedback, so we can keep making this better and better.  You're a hugely important part of the process.

The big stuff for this release:

1. Improved communication, especially around the feedback system.  We've made the star rating interface much better, separated out the comments, made it possible to leave multiple comments on a single feature, and now daytender admins can respond back to your feedback directly, allowing for a dialogue. 
2. Responding to your feedback.  We've done so much based on your feedback.
3. Design improvements.  None of us are professional designers, but we keep tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, and we hope that we're getting our chops.
4. DailyMirror is smoooooooooth… we've done a lot to improve the DailyMirror experience, include free-form plan and history entry (you can still access counters).
5. Dashboard is much more useful.  You've gotta check out the word clouds.  Fill in at least 3 Daily Mirrors, with relevant data for Body, Emotions, Thoughts, and Gratitude.  Good stuff will happen.   :)
6. It seems that the counters aren't ready to be the main dish, so we've left them on the side table while we work out more important things.  We'll come back to them, though, since we've got the feeling that they're really important.

Here's a bunch of the stuff that we heard and some of the things that we did about it.  This is just a small fraction of what we've done based on your feedback, though hopefully it gives you a good idea that we're for real about co-developing this with you.

BIG BAD BUG

"My profile disappeared between yesterday and today - all data seem to be gone from the site.   Strange, as I did get a reminder mail this morning."  Several people hit this issue that we found on day 1.  If you log in at daytender.com and www.daytender.com, it creates 2 accounts for you with 2 different sets of data. 

This was a really tough one, but Scott came through and fixed this issue.  If it happened to you, your accounts have been merged.  It also won't happen again.  The merging might not be perfect, though we've tried to do the best that we can.  You might want to check out the Counters page if you customized that.

We've even helped fix this especially for a number of users.

COMMENTS

"how come I can't comment more than once on some feature, hmm? "

You can now.  Have at it!  We've actually done a ton in this area

DESIGN

A number of people told us that our site doesn't help a new user understand why they'd use it.

We've iterated and iterated and iterated on the site for this and hope that the front page experience and the initial daily mirror experience gets us part of the way there.

"I would like a short sentence under each of the four tabs describing what I am getting into. But maybe that is just because this is new to me."

We added new text on tooltips for the updated dashboard and added richer descriptions on each of the pages to make them more explanatory.

"The emotion petals didn't load fully"

We've greatly improved image hosting and file loading on the site.

COUNTERS

Almost all of the comments here were about specific counters: "Ok- I want minutes of exercise w/ customizable labels" 

This helped us realize that people didn't know that counters are completely customizable for the users.  You can create whatever you want here.  We hope that we've made the site more clear so that you can discover this.

DAILY MIRROR

About the DailyMirror Summary - "I like these. I think they are cute and I like the visuals. It would be sad to see if all the emotions were negative though, and might make someone "modify" their input to avoid seeing a negative word pile."

We built the word clouds into the dashboard.  If you don't see them, yet, you just need to fill in more DailyMirrors on your account.  :)  As for the negativity part, that's exactly the value of this.  Awareness of negativity can go a long way.

On the DailyMirror Plan - "I really like the interface on this tracking system!"

Thanks!  We think that we've made it even better.

A few comments about colors: "Font color challenging to see on iTouch."

We've completely reworked the colors schemes, keeping iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad in mind.

"The star is too close to the mantra.  When my mouse got close to it, the popup appeared and killed my meditation time.  Then I had to take time and attention away to click on the x to close the popup."

Completely redesigned the Focus page for usability.

"On my third or fourth visit to DailyMirror,  I got a nice screen introducing me to the feature.  However, when I refreshed the page, it went away.  Daily Mirror needs some introductory material to set up expectations and guide me to success.  I also need a "START" button so that I consciously start the routine."

The intro screen is both improved, and always present.  This will continue to evolve in the future.

You love the gratitude step.  "I like this part a lot!  It's important to remember what we are grateful for to counter the negative."   "Love this!"

Woot!

Many love the relax step. "This is my favorite minute of the day. Otherwise, I might not take the time to relax and breathe for weeks on end."

Testify!

Regarding the Plan step: "I'd like for this step to be optional, because it doesn't fit with the contemplative, serene nature of the rest of the routine for me. "

We changed this to free-form planning by default.  This removes the distraction of contemplating on what the next 24 hours can be.

"I appreciate the timers keeping me on a 5 minute pace"

Expect this to get even better, soon.

"I would still like a different picture every day please! As I said before- like natn'l geo's photo of the day, but more zen.

xoxo"

We hear you, and plan to get there soon.  We've gone a baby step forward and given you a new one for today.

"I definitely want the word clouds to reflect MY emotions and gratitudes. That'd be awesome."

You got it!

Opening DailyMirror piece still says "6 minutes"

Doh!  That was the easiest change.

What are the members up to?

Some other nifty things that happened along the way:

• Scott became an uncle (yesterday)!
• Ed got ordained.
• Brother Ed became dev #2.
• Dean is building his first commercial kitchen.
• The team got a projector for design meetings.

Advanced Features: Settings, PersonalCoach, Social, Feedback...

The Dashboard: it's time for your checkup

Counters & Categories: tracking your progress

DailyMirror: change your life in 5 min per day

Getting Started: making daytender work for you

VIDEO: Why daytender?

daytender.com is live!

On 1/8, Stark Raving Bits celebrated our launch party with some close friends and insiders. It was a fun event, with great feedback.

Check out http://daytender.com.    We have how-to videos, working features, and big plans. There are stars all over the site, they're a fun way to provide input on what we're doing.  Please use them to tell us what you want to see from daytender in the future.

Check it out!