DesignSvn Product Blog

Finally, after releasing the first beta in December we’re back with some exciting updates and announcements.

Firstly, we’d like to apologise for the scarce communication from our side. We’ve not been ignoring you, we’ve just been very busy working to make improvements to DesignSvn. The first beta was limited to very few testers, based on the feedback we received we’ve incorporated a whole bunch of updates, fixes and tweaks. As a result, nearly the whole application had to be re-written, it took a while but it was totally worth it!

Secondly, as of yesterday, we have pushed the latest version of DesignSvn to our production environment. Our early beta testers should notice a considerable difference in terms of functionality, stability and aesthetics. We have summarised some of the major changes we’ve incorporated below.

• The permissions system has been updated so it’s more flexible. Users don’t have roles any more, users are assigned to a workspace and an administrator can set their privileges which define how the user interacts with DesignSvn.
• A notification system has been integrated. Users can now subscribe to notifications and they will be alerted whenever a new comment, revision or status change has occurred on a particular concept or workspace.
• The way notes are created has totally changed. Users can now add notes when previewing the full size of a revision and not on the concept’s page. The concept’s page included a cropped version of a concept, these cropped areas might have to be annotated and it wasn’t possible to achieve this on the concept’s page.
• Some particular areas of the application have been re-built to use AJAX. Although we liked the simplicity of DesignSvn initially we decided to incorporate AJAX in those areas that really required it to avoid unnecessary page reloads and to spice up the aesthetics to include some nice effects.
• Other updates include major bug fixes, stability improvements and general changes from feedback we received.

Invitations

We appreciate the interest that many users have shown upon DesignSvn and we would like to give everyone an opportunity to test and evaluate DesignSvn. If you’re interested in testing DesignSvn and plan on providing valuable feedback you may apply for an invitation code by taking our quick one minute survey.

Please do not ask us for an invite on Twitter, we need to keep a track of all invitations sent. If you want an invite you must fill out our survey. Invitations will not be released as soon as you take the survey, invitations are released on a periodic basis in small batches.

Reporting Bugs and Suggestions

If you have managed to get hold of an invitation code and would like to report something unusual you have spotted, a bug, or simply suggest anything please use our support system to do so.

http://support.designsvn.com

You can find the support link once you login on the footer of your account. Alternatively, there is a support link on the homepage as well.

Other Changes

Finally, you may have noticed we updated our homepage and included a signup form for the beta registration. We’ve also updated our blog platform, which requires RSS subscribers to update their feeds.

We’ve finally managed to wrap all the necessary tasks to accomplish the beta. It has taken us a while to reach this stage; we’ve rewritten code, tweaked features, updated certain parts of the UI and made a whole bunch of changes to finally achieve a product that works and looks great.

We’re overwhelmed with the response we got from people that are interested in participating for the beta. Unfortunately we will not be able to accept everyone, we’re going to limit the beta testers to 150 users maximum. We’ve decided to do this in order to have control over the beta, by working with fewer users it’s easier to manage and will also help us work closer with them.

Some of you may be wondering how do you know if you got selected and when do you get your invite? If you were one of the lucky ones that got selected you will receive an email with your invitation code. However, different users will receive their invites at different times.

We have decided to split the beta into several rounds, in each round we will accept a whole batch of new users. The first round launched earlier this week, a few of you have already received an email with an invitation code and some others will get their invite via Twitter.

That’s all for now. As we progress with the development we will be posting regular updates on the blog, make sure you’re in the loop!

Things have been pretty quiet around here since we’ve been concentrating on the development of DesignSvn – I have some great news to share with all of you as well as a few more teasers to show you all.

The beta is very close, yes it really is! There are still a few parts of the application that need to be further tweaked, features that need to be removed and some that still need to be added, but overall, the product is fully functional. Watching how DesignSvn has come to life from being a concept we thought, to actually being a functional product makes us really excited! We’re anticipating the launch as much as you are and can’t wait to release it and hear what you all have to say about it.

Teaser

Firstly, I’d like to announce a nice little feature we thought of while we were developing – the lock feature. The lock feature can be used on individual concepts to lock them – this prohibits anyone else from making changes to the concept except for the person who locked the concept. This particular feature is very similar to the one of Subversion and can be very useful for those of you who collaborate with multiple designers and are worried that your work will be “over-written”.

Adding users and associating them to companies couldn’t be easier. The preview below currently shows the current design of the user management page – the page is pretty straight forward and explains itself.

Additionally, you can also assign users permissions and restrict their actions. The screenshot below shows the current design of the permissions page. You can assign users three different roles which include administrator priveledges, collaborator or designer privilidges and client privileges who have limited access to the application.

Finally, you can see from some parts of the preview that the UI has had some subtle but noticeable changes. Nick has been constantly working and pushing out updates to make sure we make use of the best usability practices in order to make the application easy to use without having to refer to any documentation/requesting assistance.

Beta Participants

By the end of this month, we will be sending out an email to those of you who got into the beta to let you know a bit more about what exactly is going on and how you can access your account.

We’ve also shut down the beta application form and will not be taking in any more applications for the time being. We’re over-whelmed with the response we have received and unfortunately cannot accept any more applications because we’d like to control the beta and also have limited resources until we launch.

DesignSVN is an application meant to help designers keep track of their work and of their design process. As I’ve been personally doing most of the design work behind DesignSVN, I’m now going to share the process behind it. By the way, the following also contains several updated previews of DesignSVN.

The Idea

The initial idea of DesignSVN was born several months ago.
We all use web-based application as part of our daily workflow, for managing our to-do lists, projects, expenses, etc. Actually there are good web apps to manage projects out here, Basecamp is one of our favorites and one we use on a daily basis. However there is none specifically crafted to fit designers’ needs.

As a designer, I often face problems in managing revisions and clients feedback. For example, I tend to create several versions of the same concept, trying different layouts or colour schemes. Also, depending on the client’s feedback, I often need to go back to a previous version of the design and make amends and fixes. These steps are iterated until I reach a design which gets approved by the client. Sounds familiar? Sure it does for me.

We built DesignSVN to address these needs and help designers get things on track.

The Very Beginning

As we’re an international team, we had lots of conference chats initially, to brainstorm and jot down ideas.

How is this supposed to work? What features are we going to build for our users?
As designers ourselves, what features would we need?

We begun with creating sketches and charts of the user flows, to get an idea of how users would use our application.

This document also served as a guide for the next steps, as it contained most of the information about user interaction.

Wireframing

The next step of the design process was to begin sketching the User Interface. We chose to build wireframes of the different screens, so to have a clear guide for both visual design and development.

This phase was crucial also to spot and solve several usability issues and decide the layout of elements.
For me, for the visual design, this was extremely helpful, as we defined a shared vision and guidelines of how the app should look, simplifing my work.

UI Design

Based on the wireframes, I begun working on the UI design, shaping the look&feel of the app.

Keeping the same visual design as the logo and the splash page (the dark blue / violet starry sky), I tried designing something that had a strong identity while being inviting and fun to use. What I personally don’t like of some web apps is that their UIs are poor and not really appealing. I somewhat tried to mix the ease of use of a simple UI and the style of the iPhone apps (which in fact are very appealing).

This phase required a lot of Photoshop work and several revisions (8 to be precise). For each concept we always had chats and kept a comment board to discuss it, spot potential issues and find ways to make it better.

While the visual design has been kept from the inital concepts, wide parts of the layout have been changed, moved or completely redesigned, until we reached something we were all satisfied with.

Once we found a design we all liked, I moved forward creating designs for all pages and screens, skinning buttons and form elements as well as creating icons sets.

Polish and Refinement

Last phase of the design was to polish things up, add details and refine the UI. This was done to perfect the visual design and also to address some usability issues that we become aware of during the process. The ouput Photoshop files were then ready for slicing and coding.

I hope to have given you a quick look at the process behind designing DesignSVN. As you probably have noticed, we ourselves would have had great benefits in using DesignSVN to manage our own design process and iterate through revisions. This is exaclty why we built it.

I myself am looking forward to managing my own design projects with DesignSVN, and hope you are too.

For those of you that have been following our Twitter account from the start, this is the post you’ve been waiting for – we finally have some screenshots to show you and for those ones who missed it on Twitter. Since this post is simply a sneak preview and we’re currently in development we have decided to select a few screens and also limit the features we announce until the final beta is ready.

The following page above is the dashboard page. The dashboard is simply an overview of all your work which is categorized into workspaces or projects and provides a summary with a thumbnail (The grey area) and recent activity within that workspace – this includes latest comments, updates and status messages.

Within this page users will also be able to create new workspaces and archive or view archived workspaces. We’ve also built an alternative layout/view to the dashboard which can be toggled by the user (We’re not going to post any screens for this view, we’re leaving it as a surprise for the beta testers).

The above page is the concept’s page, within this page users will be able to manage a single concept. There are various actions and utilities that can be performed from this page – some notable features include the ability to manage multiple revisions and also assign “notes” or “tags” on the actual thumbnail.

Users also have the ability to invite collaborators or colleagues and clients in order to collaborate, track progress and provide feedback. All concept’s have a status which can either be rejected, approved or pending, users can change this state by simply dragging the slider to the corresponding state they desire.

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for more updates, we’re expecting to have a private beta ready by July and we’ll be looking for a limited number of private testers, if you’re interested in testing DesignSvn keep an eye on our Twitter account.