Three Clever Xobni Features (3/3): Prefilling Invites

This is installment 3 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

Previously:

1. Are You Happy? (1/3)
2. As-You-Yype Search (2/3)

On January 9th, we started allowing our existing users to invite their friends to Xobni. If they have invites to send, this is what appears in the sidebar:



Clicking on the box brings up this window:



The dialog shows a list of your top contacts who use Outlook, which we identify by looking at headers of emails you received from them. These people are exactly the audience for Xobni!

This feature is an instance of smart defaults, not just sensible defaults. We take the vast amount of data in your email repository and do something smart with it. (The beauty is that the core piece of this functionality was written in one day with our powerful email data framework.) That's exactly what Xobni is about.

Three Clever Xobni Features (2/3): As-you-type Search

This is installment 2 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

Previously: Three Clever Xobni Features (1/3): Are you Happy?

Traditionally, you type in the query, hit Enter, and get the results. In Xobni, you start typing your query and we start showing you results as-you-type.



Outlook 2007 has a similar feature: When you type and pause for a bit, it starts a search in the background. But it's the same operation at the same speeds as their normal search. In contrast, our search indexes and data files are optimized for incremental search: We search for prefixes, not full words. This makes us much faster.



The next installment of this series appears on Monday, January 14. Subscribe to my RSS feed to get updates.

Three Clever Xobni Features (1/3): "Are you Happy?"

This is installment 1 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

We're religious about user feedback at Xobni. We get dozens of emails every day and read every single one. If you uninstall us, we ask for comments around why you uninstalled and how we could improve. We've built tools to collect and summarize this data.

But most users aren't vocal about their needs. The average happy user is unlikely to email with small problems she might be seeing. We want their feedback, but can't just pop up a window with a survey every time you use the software.

That's why we built Are you Happy?: Instead of a popup, we add a little box on the bottom of the sidebar every couple of weeks and ask: "Are you happy?" There are two buttons, Yes and No, and an optional comment field.



This is the most lightweight method of collecting user feedback. Note that:

1. We're not popping up an annoying window.
2. We ask a simple question.
3. There are only two options – "yes" and "no" - and no Send button.

If we introduce unpopular features or bugs, we know within a few days. This feature was inspired by a similar mechanism in the early days of Caribou.

Currently, 90% of our users answer "Yes".

The next installment of this series appears on Thursday, January 10. Subscribe to my RSS feed to get updates.