We recently conducted an online survey to get to know more about you, the users of motigo. Most of your answers were as we had expected, but some were also rather surprising.

It has been a great learning experience for us to get our assumptions about who you all are blown away and replaced by actual facts. The whole process of discovering who our users really are have made us all create our own new archetypical users in our minds, which has led us to launch a new persona effort. A HCI tool that we can greatly approve of.

Just for the fun of it, let me very shortly sketch one of our main archetypical users in bullet-form:

• Male and 40 years old
• Has his focus on developing personal and private websites with information about a specific topic
• Has only little knowledge about web standards and techniques like CSS
• Does not read the developer blog (Argh!!!! - not good!)

You also told us what you would most like to see in the future from motigo: Blogs and photo albums. Coming up.

And don’t worry - the lucky winners of the survey will be announced shortly and receive their prize: an iPod Shuffle.

It’s always cool to see your product get used in cool and innovative ways. To encourage such behavior, we added embed-able versions of our newly launched calendar. By placing a few lines of javascript codes to your static html page, you will automatically get a very dynamic calendar shown on your page. Just like you would show an ad from google - now just with some real content

Some of our users have done a really nice job of using these small-size calendars on their page. We feel that we should give you a view into how cool your motigo calendar can look and how nice it works. Check out these pages for inspiration on how you can improve your own site with your very own calendar functionality:

• Minigolf Club Classic KoÅ¡ice
  Has integrated the month view quite nicely into his existing design. The calendar fits seamlessly with it’s surrounding elements.
• de nieuwe sch@kel
  Has both integrated a calendar RSS feed into his calendar and uses the embed-able month view to show this on his page. Very nice!
• Historia de Guipúzcoa
  Notice how well the transparent background of the calendar works perfect with the general layout of the site.
• THE OZ…
  Check out how nicely the agenda view and the month view work together side-by side.

We are extremely happy to see the already widespread use of our newly launched calendar - and especially that people are using it both as we planned, but also in new ways that just want us to keep on improving it.

We are looking forward for finding even more cool uses of the motigo projects in the future. Do you know of some?

We are very happy to announce the Launch of motigo calendars! It is the first stand-alone product that we have developed ourselves from scratch, and we are more than happy with the result. If you don’t have an account yet, then sign up for a free account and give it a go.

Creating the calendar has been a great example of constrained based development. With only very little time to develop the application, we had to make vital decisions on what our new application was to do and what it was not going to do. The constraints turned out to be a blessing in that it kept our heads focused on exactly what is important for our product for it to work: it has swept the unimportant nice-to-haves away from the must-haves and secured a simple and non-bloated product.

The calendar is really an ordinary calendar application with two views: an administration area that is only accessible for the owner of the calendar (a motigo user), and a public version, which is visible to everybody. The public version of the calendar would look like this.

But it is not only a web calendar. The motigo calendar has two very intersting features:

• Import of RSS feeds
  If you have a blog, a flickr stream, or whatever kind of web content that streams as an RSS feed, you can import it into your calendar. You can also import several feeds into your calendar in order to use it as a feed reader. The possiblities are many!
• Include a small version of the calendar on your own page
  If you have a homepage on your own domain - or just another domain that motigo.com, but still want dynamic content directly inside your page’s main view, then the motigo calendar will help you out. Ad dynamic calendar content directly to your page, like you would add a banner ad.

Now - enough reading - go play around with it!

We just launched a new part of our site called motigo search. Hurray!

In the last few weeks, we have been in a steady stream of solid updates to the motigo website in general. We have come a long way since we started in March earlier this year.

This time we added search capabilities to motigo. The “motigo search”:http://motigo.com/search has been born.

Now you can search the web for pictures and video to reference in your blog posts or in your forum discussions. We feel that we by that have a superior product to many competitors. The search also allows your to search our “webstats”:http://webstats.motigo.com counter catalogue.

The future will call for a full motigo service search, but as we felt the described update in itself provided enough significant value to our users to stand on its own, we decided to push out the search capabilities as they are now in their early state.

Please go try it out and let us know what you think.

Things are really starting to get better at motigo!
We are very happy to announce the launch of the new account overview. A feature that was both widely requested, but also extremely important in bringing the motigo services together.

When we first launched motigo in the end of March this year, the most important thing for us was just to get motigo up and running. It is now - a few months later - that we can actually start to tweak motigo into being what we actually want. The new account overview and the recent “frontpage redesign”:http://devblog.motigo.com/2007/06/04/redesigning-the-frontpage-step-2/ are some of the more visual steps we have taken in this direction.

As usual, we will give you an insight into the design process.

As opposed to earlier redesigns, we actually didn’t have anything to redesign! The account overview has been non-existent until now. We wanted the new page to fulfill a list of things:

• First of all, the overview should bring all motigo services together: giving an overview
• The page should function as the natural “home page” - the page you always end up on when you want to do something new
• We wanted as much of motigo to be accessible from only one page
• We wanted to communicate the colour scheme of motigo, where each service has its own color

Our first thought was to reuse the toolboxes we have so far used for the forum/guestbook/shorturl admin pages as these had the color of the respective service in the header. The result came to look like this:

We chose to take the approach of designing everything straight and only in HTML instead of taking the usual photoshop way that many designers choose. Doing the design in HTML only gave us several benefits:

• The actual interface is at the center of the attention at first. There is no spec: the interface is the spec.
• An interface is not a wireframe that we can just slice up and magically transform into an HTML document. Neither is it a photoshop mockup.
• Creating a mock-up of the interface in photoshop will produce a design that matches the constraints of photoshop - not the constraints of HTML. We should therefore “embrace the constraints”:http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch03_Embrace_Constraints.php of HTML.
• When we build it only in HTML, we can actually use real and live data while building the design. This helps surfacing problems that photoshop would otherwise hide
• The interface is at life from start. You can click it, try it out, and feel it.
• You will get something that works very soon in the design process
• There is no monster integration in the end.

Although the new and colorful proposal was better than anything we had before (we didn’t have anything) - it was too much. Too colorful and tivoli like. Plus - the boxes approach to showing each service did not always line up nicely, when a user had services in one category than the other.

The next approach was to list the services in one big list and now side-by-side. We removed the colorful header of each service and give it a more settled look:

This however proved to be a little too settled. This meant that we didn’t get to indicate any of the colors of the services. So we added a little bit of color:

Again - this was too much. The final solution would be just to have a small box indicating the color of the service:

We also wanted to add several things to the overview page, so that the user would go there as a natural thing to find just the information he wanted to see. These things included basic information about the logged in user: his name and email, but also the current time in the timezone he had selected. As we have users in many different countries, setting the timezone of your account has huge importance as it will determine the time of your forums and guestbooks as well as the base time in your statistics. We also added links to often used and important documents such as FAQs, terms of service, and of course the developer blog ;-).
All this provided the necessary detail to make the Account overview feel like a real motigo home…

Along with the overview, we’ve also added a toolbox that is placed in the same spot on all admin pages, so that you can always find your way to the most important pages of motigo.com. This continuity was greatly missed in the old version of motigo, why we are relieved that we finally got it online.

We also got rid of the top bar with the list of our services, as we now have this list a more natural place: in the account overview. Instead we added a search bar that we plan on expanding to be able to do more in the near future.

We really hope that the newest updates has helped your experience of motigo.com. We are extremely happy about the release ourselves and hope that you will be as well.

Now, go enjoy the new “motigo”:http://motigo.com

Today has been the big localization day.

Two days ago, we announced an update of the forums and guestbooks that was to happen last night. The update was about converting our entire database for forums and guestbooks from latin1 hell to utf8 bliss. The update has allowed us to not only handle special characters without the problems of HTML encoding, but also to offer support for languages which aren’t based on the western alphabet. So this is a happy day for our Arabic, Russian, and Asian users.

Another big update is the support for timezones for guestbooks and forums. To change the timezone for your forum, simply log in with your motigo account, click on “my account” in the top bar, change the timezone to what you prefer, and save your account details. If you wish, you can even change it to another timezone afterwards, and everything will be changed on-the-fly.

We are happy to announce these to features, which has been on the top of the wishlist for a load of motigo users.

If we have to say it ourselves, we just added a really cool feature to “Motigo Webstats”:http://webstats.motigo.com. When you click to see the stastitics of your page, for instance that of our “highest ranked member”:http://webstats.motigo.com/s?tab=1&link=1&id=710309 at the moment, a google map now shows you the most recent visits to your page visually on a world map. The most recent hits are marked with map markers on the map.

We are very excited about this nifty little feature and just wanted to tell you about it. Expect a lot of new cool stuff from motigo soon.

One of the biggest advantages of developing “web applications”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application as opposed to “desktop applications”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_software is their often “short development cycle”:http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/iterationplanning.html. “Lightweight development methodologies”:http://www.extremeprogramming.org/light1.html with short iterations (development cycles) allow for the developers to react more rapidly on feedback from the customer and the product’s users. There is a relatively short path from when a feature is suggested until it can possibly be implemented.

As both desktop applications and web applications grow in size, it gets increasingly harder to react rapidly towards customer feedback in order to point the developer’s attention in the right direction. As applications grow bigger, a small change to the software can possibly effect many parts of the whole application, why each new feature gets increasingly cumbersome to release as the product grows in size.

To be able to react to changes in its environment, the application should always be the “simplest possible implementation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refactoring possible.

At times, the fundamental requirements of the application go against the goal of always having the simplest possible implementation. To stay “agile”:http://agilemanifesto.org, this dilemma needs clever and flexible attention.

At motigo, we have services that originate from multiple countries. “Motigo Webstats”:http://webstats.motigo.com was originally nedstat - a Dutch website, and “Motigo Forums”:http://motigo.com/about/forums, “Motigo Guestbooks”:http://motigo.com/about/guestbooks, and “Motigo Shorturls”:http://motigo.com/about/shorturls were originally “webtropia”:http://webtropia.com/ products - a German website. This means that our primary users are from the Nederlands and Germany - thus we have a need for more than just one language.

We currently have everything in 5 languages. This has put a serious barrier for us to be able to make rapid changes and react rapidly upon feedback. Every time we want to make a new screen, or just make changes in the existing practice, we need translations in all of the 5 languages that we currently support. This means that many changes that has been thoroughly tested and are ready to go public have to wait several days for our translators to finish their job.

A clever and flexible solution to cope with this problem in all contexts is still something we aim to find. If any of you have any experience with this, we would love to hear from you. However, for changes that have to do with presentation, we already found an approach that works fine.

As an example, in our process of “redesigning the front page”:http://devblog.motigo.com/?p=5, we started out making the changes visible only when you had chosen English as a language.

This proved effective, as we had made several changes based on user feedback even before the first translations rolled in. If you’re quick, you can even see that at the moment, it is only for English, German, and Dutch, that we have the new frontpage banner implemented. For French and Spanish, the old flashy banner is still showing.

When starting out by only implementing changes in English, which we (the developers) are all fluent in, we can again start to react rapidly on feedback instead of having to wait 4-5 days for all translations in all 5 languages.

As our plan is to implement 7 more languages (12 in total) in the new future, the dilemma will become increasingly more important to cope with in a clever way as we move along.

Again - if any of you guys have any input about our dilemma with wanting to push the features out to you as soon as possible and still having 12 languages to cope with, then please comment this thread and let us know.