Posts tagged as “behind-the-scenes”
Hi, everyone:
We admit it has been a while since our last Delicious product release, and here’s why:
- We’ve been doing some housework and cleared up over 200 issues reported by you and our engineers.
- We’ve spent the last few months making sure that if we suffer a major technical outage, we can rely on a fully operational copy of the site so you’re impacted for as little time as possible.
- There were a few UI changes we needed to make before a larger release launches in a couple of months.
Most of these changes might not be obvious, but you’re bound to notice better-looking buttons, which are the first in a series of improvements we’ll be making to the interface.
We’ve also removed the SHARE link for private bookmarks. Though you can change the privacy setting by clicking EDIT or the Lock icon to the left of the link.
Another change to note is that Tags on the site will be basic rectangles instead of chevrons. We hope this will remove some points of confusion, reduce the code slightly, and limit how much the display fractures, when you increase the browser text size.
As you can see, we’ve been active listeners and tried to incorporate your continuous feedback in making the above changes.
Enjoy!
August 4th, 2010
It has been a few weeks now since we launched the new Delicious, and we wanted to take a moment to update you on how things are going so far.
Infrastructure
The most important news is that our new platform has been stable and is meeting our performance goals. In the days of the old Delicious, we had to put a lot of effort into just keeping the lights on and struggling to keep up with growth. With our new infrastructure, these problems are largely gone and our pagers have never been so quiet. But more importantly the Delicious service is now faster and more reliable, which was a key goal of this project. In fact, I’m very happy to say that Delicious has experienced zero downtime since the day after launch. (Hopefully now that I’ve said that we won’t discover an unshielded thermal exhaust port somewhere…)
Some of you have reported seeing error messages indicating you’ve been “blocked†from accessing Delicious or that the service is unavailable. This is not due to Delicious being down (it isn’t); rather it appears the primary cause is a bug in older versions of our Delicious Bookmarks add-on for Firefox. If you use our Firefox add-on please make sure you have the very latest version from here. You can also make sure you’re up-to-date by clicking “Find Updates†under “Tools” → “Add-ons” in Firefox.
Browser add-ons
Speaking of add-ons, we recently launched our Internet Explorer add-on. It includes most of the features offered by our popular Firefox version and works with IE 6 and 7 (IE 8 beta 2 generally works as well, although it won’t be official until IE 8 is). The response has been great so far; thanks to all of you who have tried it out. Your comments on the forum have helped us track down a number of bugs that we addressed in a major update last week. There were also some issues with our Firefox add-on immediately following the launch of the new Delicious, and we recently released an update for that as well. So please make sure you’re running our latest versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Design
We had two major goals for the new design. The first was to address the user feedback we’ve received over the last few years regarding usability problems, consistency issues, and interface bugs. Our second goal was to make Delicious even easier to understand and thus to bring new users into the community. So far it seems to be working on both counts. The majority of the feedback has been positive (thanks!), and we’re also seeing a notable increase in new users and general traffic across Delicious.
That said, we know that not all of you are fans of the new design. There has been plenty of vocal and well-reasoned feedback on the discussion forum, and we’ve been reading every post and email and responding as much as possible. We’ve also been taking action. Since the initial launch we’ve made more than 30 changes to the new interface, nearly all of them in direct response to user feedback. We’ve also fixed a number of bugs you pointed out. You can read more about these changes here.
Moving forward we will continue listening to and taking action based on your comments, questions, bug reports, and suggestions. We want to ensure that Delicious remains the greatest social bookmarking tool, both for new users and for the people who already know and love it. We’re also working on new functionality that you’ve been asking for, and we look forward to sharing more about that soon.
If you haven’t already, please join the conversation on our forum and let us know what you think. Thanks for using Delicious!
September 30th, 2008
As mentioned here before, the del.icio.us team is presently in the midst of a major project: building a new platform which will speed up the site and help us grow even faster. At the same time we’re also taking a close look at our UI and exploring ways to make it both easier to use and more functional. Over the years we’ve heard a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Many folks like the simple and terse nature of the site, while others take issue with certain elements of the design (shockingly, some of you think that light-blue-on-salmon-pink is not a good color combination; more shockingly, some of you think that it is). Our challenge then is to make del.icio.us better without messing up the stuff that already works.
We’ve been working on some new design ideas and recently conducted a series of usability tests to see if these ideas work. We brought in about a dozen people, both existing users and a few people who were new to del.icio.us. Yahoo! (our parent company) has some great facilities for this sort of thing which we basically moved into and hogged for about a week. It was a lot of fun for us (and, it seemed, for the participants), and we learned a lot from watching people use the site and try out our new designs. As we expected, we heard feedback all across the spectrum, and nearly all of it is proving deeply useful in our continuing work.
Here’s some stats from the tests:
- 20 participants
- Over 2000 post-it notes used
- 562 unique observations recorded
- Hundreds of design tweaks made as a result of feedback
- 62 cups of drip coffee and 23 lattes consumed
- Most disappointing thing overheard: “I don’t really get tagsâ€
- Most gratifying thing overheard: “del.icio.us has totally changed my life”
- Funniest thing overheard: “I’m pleased; this new design doesn’t look like an angry fruit salad”
In the very near future we’re going to have a beta of the new design so we can get even more feedback (watch this space for announcements). Please also feel free to use this blog to share your thoughts about what you’d like to see different in del.icio.us. More cowbell? Less pink? Let us know.
Stephen Hood
Product Manager
July 9th, 2007
We’ve been busy: since our announcement in september of our millionth signup, another half-million users have joined the fun. And because of this, we’ve been more quiet then I would like, and I want to apologize.
It feels that we’ve spent almost all of our time uncomfortably bursting at the seams; we’ve always been at pretty much close to capacity. We’ve worked very hard to keep the system as stable as possible and as fast as possible in that time. However, I feel that during this very exciting time for the team I’ve personally had less capacity for talking more openly to the delicious community about what’s been going on. Given that we’ve undergone a lot of changes and have a lot more in store in the future, I want to resolve to be better about communicating.
For starters, even though it feels like we’ve been doing less feature work, we still have been doing weekly releases to improve performance (the new Firefox extension gets a new revision every few days it seems). Going forward, we’re going to be talking much more about what’s changed, where the bugs are, and in general, more explicit about what we’re doing.
While we’ve done some integration work with Yahoo, it’s now time to do more meaningful joint development work to take advantage of all the great technology that a company that does one hojillion hits a day has at its disposal. Doing this is pretty involved, and we’re going to take the opportunity to redo things like the UI and fix many of the less-beloved historical design quirks that still linger from my original implementation. Doing such large changes in the dark is, I think, a huge mistake, and I want to try to have a phased rollout so that everyone can get comfortable as we figure out what the future product looks like.
Late last year, our team was joined by Abe’s team, whose previous project was the backend for the new Yahoo Photos and MyWeb 1 before that. These guys know scalability like nobody’s business. On the front-end, we’ve been joined by Erik and his team of all-around asskickers. And Patrick has built a team to develop a new set of browser plugins that allow for much deeper browser integration. I have high hopes that our expanded team will be able to release a new and tastier delicious someday in the not-too distant future.
We’ve still got many questions to answer — Commas or spaces? In what way should we allow logins from Yahoo!? How should a next-generation API work? Should we do something about the dots in the name? and many more, and I look forward to figuring these things out with you in the future.
Here’s to a new year and a lot more conversation.
Joshua
February 1st, 2007
We had our party this week, and thanks to all the folks who came to help us celebrate our million user milestone and third birthday. I had a great time meeting everyone and we all were flabbergasted at the response, we were expecting maybe 100 to show up and we had at least twice as many!
A big thanks to everyone who could make it- but especially to Dan and Clara who created a meta version of our cake icon in the form of an actual cake! Finally, we’re sorry that we haven’t invented the beaming technology that could bring all our users to Sunnyvale, but we do have photos. Check them out at http://del.icio.us/party2006!
October 5th, 2006
Please join Flickr, Upcoming.org, Del.icio.us, and Yahoo!, for Happy Hour on Sunday March 12 at Iron Cactus on the corner of Trinity and 6th from 5 to 7-ish. It’ll be fun!
Terms of Service:
User Generated Content:
Note: Space is limited, so please mark that you’re attending this event to get on the guest list. Yup, this means you need to have an Upcoming.org account to RSVP (cads!), but I’m sure you already have one!
Update: If you are a Flickr, del.icio.us or Upcoming.org user but don’t have a SXSW badge, please RSVP here and we’ll get you in!
March 4th, 2006
Today, del.icio.us turns two years old. Thanks to everyone who tolerated our burps along the way.
Speaking of burps: After several days of having our web proxy crash at precisely 6:26am EST, we’ve figured it out. Apologies to everyone who has been inconvenienced.
September 15th, 2005
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