After a couple of months in private beta, the Rocketr team is ready to remove the curtains and let the sunshine real data in.
The team did a lot of soul searching these past two months. We collected tremendous amounts of feedback, studied several early use cases, picked up on key observations, and actioned some very difficult changes. While talking to your earliest of users isn’t for the faint of heart, we are certainly glad we did it.
With that, we’re proud to finally send this product into the wild. If you’d like to skip ahead, you can sign back in to your Rocketr account here.
What changes will you see?
Introducing a 3rd Column
The content relationships in Rocketr dictated a move to 3 columns. From the standpoint of creating notebooks, being added as an Editor to other peoples’ notebooks, and Following public notebooks – we knew we needed a better system for the user to manage their notebooks. This is the first step towards that end.
Easier Sharing and Ranking
You might recall us talking about feature utilization rates in a previous post. One thing was clear during our beta – nobody knew what to do with a really great note! We’ve tried to simplify that this time around with a much clearer set of sharing options and a more easily understood approach to how notes are ranked.
More Room for Editing Notes
Notes evolve. Maybe not right away, but certainly over time. We took another step in the right direction by breaking out the note editing interface into a modal for more flexibility. More to come here as well.
Level 1 Notifications
Finally, we also took a first crack at some base level notifications (which we intend to build on in our next iteration). Special thanks to PostageApp for providing a wickedcool system for handling these!
Behind the Scenes
Feature-wise, it’s not a world of difference from where we left off. Most of our efforts during the beta were put into improving the user experience and back end. The changes that were made give us an interface that will grow with our users over a longer period of time, and a code base that will make adding new features much easier going forward. Users should notice an overall improvement in the speed of the application as well.
We also spent a great deal of time fine-tuning our data systems, which are designed to help us draw conclusions about how new and existing features are performing at a much faster pace.
Going forward, we hope to be pushing updates faster than a speeding potato. Stay tuned!