July Update
Design tagging in!
Hey there! Coby Almond here, with a design update takeover for StoryTime, a backlog management tool for XP practitioners and balanced teams.
While Nat and Jesse are recovering from a summer road trip visiting friends, I’m bringing you the content you crave ;-).
Design Happy Place
As Nat mentioned in the June update, we’ve been contemplating things design-wise. In a stack-ranked list of things teams have decided to talk about and are important, the story experience is crucial. The initial story layout served us well to prove out our tech stack and in testing. But now, we want to feel something when we open a story. Here’s our first early attempt:
This represents a starting point for further iterations we intend to pursue. We’re prioritizing a few things with this exploration:
Readability/Scan-ability
(“🙌 for line wrap”)
Activity Narrative
(“What’s happening here?”)
Way-finding
(“Wait, which story again? 12? Got it.”)
Familiarity
(“Ahh, good to be home.”)
We want StoryTime to feel like it was always part of your workflow and team tooling, with similar affordances and style, gets out of your way, but is opinionated enough to feel just right, like the moment when you know what you’re doing in the morning and sip your caffeine of choice.
In other words, aesthetically, we’re your favorite code editor + a cozy 1980’s library card catalog + an analog mixing console + your old high-school Trapper Keeper + a classy BBS.
You should see this visual update to the alpha version of StoryTime in the coming weeks. If you want to be onboarded and kick the tires with other testers, let us know in your reply to this email ❤️.
Next Month
We continue to refine and improve our drag and drop/drop zones, scrolling behaviors, system status indicators, error messages, login flow, keyboard controls, accessibility, and more. It’s getting real! We’re also building out our internal style guide and a new public landing page to reflect our progress.
See you again in August!