Beta Launch – Round 1
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. Each time we send a new batch of invites we will announce it on our Twitter account.
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!
Development Updates!
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.
The Design Process Behind DesignSVN
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
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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. Read more
Sneak Preview
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).
Read more
Subversion for Designers
DesignSvn is an application created specifically for designers who wish to keep track of their design revisions and easily share their concepts. With DesignSvn you can store your projects and artwork in one central and accessible place, receive instantaneous feedback from your clients and collaborate with colleagues.
DesignSvn is currently in it’s development stage – we’re expecting to have a private beta ready for July and a public beta by August. Stay tuned for more information and also expect a sneak preview of this powerful application on our blog this week!
