Sleepless in Kansas

OK, Kansas is not Seattle, but I’ve been away from the project this week. Just like Tom Hanks in the movie, I’ve been waiting up nights yearning for something. For me it is the outcome of this sprint. There was no call in radio show, only IRC and email to connect me to the development team.

I’ve had a sneak peak at the new home page. Its design is clean and informative and contains fewer columns and distractions. There are no advertisements on it, which adds to the clean look. There is a sense of simplicity and focus to it that rings pretty true for me. At a glance, users can see what we are all about and quickly navigate to see courses, start educating, or learning about Premium Services.

Speaking of Premium Services, I’m also looking forward to seeing the new section of that site that is dedicated to explaining what that is all about. There will be multiple pages here, including information on pricing, requesting a demo, understanding more about content creation, etc. Oh wait, what is this? I just went to our test site and Jeff has pushed these new pages out. Let’s see…it is pretty cool. The woman in the picture even has LearningZen up on her computer! She has that look about her – she must be thinking about all of the great things she can do with her new Premiums Services portal.

I have already tested the performance improvements we are including in this sprint. Some of them are pretty dramatic – check them out when you get a chance. They are on the home page, course listing and search pages, and the My Educate landing page.

I am most eagerly awaiting the new Premium Services package pricing enhancements, which include multiple levels of packaging and monthly or yearly billing. There are a bunch of permutations to test in this area and I’m up for the challenge of breaking it. I love getting my hands on new features and looking for things that don’t quite work as smoothly as they could. I’ll write another time about my approach to testing, but suffice it to say; it is something I take no small amount of glee from, especially when I find stuff developers say cannot happen.

As always, your comments are welcome.

 

Thomas Klassen