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Coordinatr.com

It's been a busy month for us here at Coordinatr. We have been working on making Coordinatr more robust which unfortunately means that when we deploy the changes, you don't get to see anything new :-(. However, we just rolled out an update that has a few user-facing features that are worth mentioning!

First, we began an initial redesign of the notifications page. Instead of tons of checkboxes, you'll now see radio buttons which more clearly indicate if you will receive a notification or not. If you haven't checked out the page, take a look at http://coordinatr.com/profile/notifications.

Next, we have some improvements to the events pages. Any URLs you enter in the description of the event or post in a comment will now be displayed as a clickable link. For readability, if the link is long, we chop out the middle when we display it, but clicking on it will still take you to the full URL. Also on the event page, some people experienced an issue when trying to login using the modalbox. This happens when you aren't logged into the site, but get to the event page by clicking on a link in an email. This should now be resolved. Sorry about that one!

Last, but certainly not least, we updated some of the emails and SMS messages. For example, you can now RSVP to an event directly from the Invite email. We're also including the full date and time of the event in the SMS invite messages s

When You're on the Go...April 22

The premise of Coordinatr has always been to enable users to quickly and efficiently create last minute events. This objective actually runs counter to us providing a service via a website that requires you to be at a laptop or desktop.

What if you're on the way to your event and you find that it's closed? (this actually just happened to me last Monday) Or you're running out of drinks at the BBQ and want to let people know that they should stop by the store and pick some up?

And let's be honest...you've spent the week working and you're definitely not going to be on the computer during the weekend. How can you be notified of last minute events then?

We've been working on solving that little conundrum. In fact, we just pushed out the functionality for users and event creators to interact with their events over SMS (text message).

Here's how it works:

Go into your account, go to settings and then communications. Enter in your phone number and choose your cell phone provider. That's all the prep work...done!
Now every time one of your friends invites you to a last minute event, you'll get a text message. Here's the great part though...if you want to respond to the event, all you have to do is reply back with the following:

To RSVP Yes:
rsvp y

To RSVP No:

Why Register?April 16

We've been asking ourselves the same question recently. Ever since we launched, we've been directing coordinatr.com to the main registration page. Our mentality was that it was so simple to register, that people would sign up and try out the site without thinking twice.

Not the case.

In reality, we underestimated how much the registration page turned people off from the site. We failed to liken registration to anything in the real world. Would you buy a car without test driving it? How about a book without flipping through it? Maybe a shirt without trying it on once? No, people love the chance to take a look at something before they fully commit to it. It took a few weeks to beat that into our skulls, but we finally wizened up to this very basic fact: you need to sell users on why they should use your site before they will even think of registering.

So I'm pretty sure you can guess what we did, right? We've added in the "test drive" functionality to the site. Rather than redirecting you to a simple registration page, we outline the very basic premise of what the site is all about: enabling you to quickly create simple events...and then let you do just that...all without registering. We allow you create an event, add friends, write messages, change dates and locations, add more friends...basically let you fully interact with the event, before ever asking for an email address and password.

The Navigation Changed!April 8

Yes, yes it did. But only a little.

We found out recently that users were having a hard time getting back to the main dashboard page after they had navigated away. We had originally designed the navigation to have the Coordinatr logo return back to the dashboard page, and had assumed that was clear to everyone else.

It wasn't. Sorry...our bad!

We had users commenting that they saw the dashboard once and then never again. In order to correct that little logic flaw, we've implemented an extra navigation option: the home link. Use it any time you want to get back to the dashboard, or "home".

While we were at it, we figured we'd make some more tweaks to the navigation. We now have submenus for each section. By clicking the name of a section in the navigation bar, you're brought to the main page of that section. You can then use the submenus to navigate within that section. The drop down menus are still available by clicking on the drop down arrows next to each section name, in case you want to skip directly to a page in a different section of the site.

Some slight tweaks were also made to font sizes, colors, positioning etc., across the site. Explore and let us know if you like the new changes!

One more thing...we're looking to roll out a big site feature very soon. Keep an eye out for it!

On User FeedbackApril 3

User feedback is a term used constantly in the startup world. It’s the driving force behind the concept of “launch early and often”. It bridges the chasm between making decisions based on what you “think” users want and what they “actually” want. Everyone’s heard this before, so let’s not beat a dead horse.

Rather, I want to talk about the differing types of user feedback. We constantly discuss as if all feedback was created equal…it’s not. Since the launch of Coordinatr three weeks ago, we’ve gotten feedback from hundreds of individuals. While parsing through it all, it became very clear that we could define and place feedback in three different categories, based on content and recommendation type.

Here are the three categories that we identified:

The first category consists of users’ feelings about the site itself. It contains no recommendations for features or discovered bugs, rather it provides the startup with a different sort of feedback: that users like and are actually using the site. This is huge for a startup just getting off the ground as it provides the motivation and reassurance that what they have been toiling over for the past few months, or even years, has not been in vane. It provides that extra motivation to make another pot of coffee and put in a few more hours of productive work…and every little bit counts in a startup.

The second category is the broadest one. It consists of feedback r