The global Collectik team is getting painfully close to releasing a new web project. Not much left but a couple of little tweaks … very exciting. I’m so happy that all the work we did on Collectik is finally blossoming into something that I really think will help people find great audio on the net. I don’t know if the new project will be a big success, but it’s something I’m very proud of. Our experience with our previous project collectik.net was so frustrating in many ways.
It suffered from a number of probably classic start-up/web errors:
1. feature creep
2. fixing user experience by adding more features, rather than stripping them away
3. never really deciding what tool was supposed to do (see notes 1 and 2)
4. making a designer design *and* do html … deadly on a project like this, esp when there’s no money in it!
These and some other things meant that we could never really make Collectik work.
At the same time, that experience helped us understand how the tool was being used by the few who used it.
So we’ve stripped it all down, to its essential and the new project is the result. We plan to start some other projects building more features back into the platform, but the new one will stay clean and simple.
Anyway, the whole process has been fascinating for me and big thanks to Chris (back-end), Marie-Eve (design), and Madeline (html) … as well as to Kristen who got collectik far enough along that we could get to the new project.
More news to come soon!