March Update
Welcome to the march issue of the StoryTime newsletter. This goes out to folks who subscribed to the interest list at https://storytime.team, and we try to get an update out to y’all about once a month.
In order to maximize the quality of feedback we can collect, we’re still onboarding individuals to the closed alpha by hand. If you’re on this list, you’re in the queue for an eventual invite. The queue has been very slow. It’s going to pick up the pace, starting this week.
We’re especially interested in prioritizing anyone who’s willing to actually use the tool for multi-week public backlog work under the closed alpha’s “anyone in the alpha can edit” honor-system conditions. If that describes you, reply to this email.
Note that we’re getting to the point of being able to refine the design now, so we expect the interface to be changing as Coby and Nat pair on improving various interactions.
In the meantime, here’s what we did this month, and what’s coming up next.
This Past Month
Renaming Backlogs. A little quality-of-life update.
Markdown! Patrick McKenzie likes to say that startups generate novel social science findings, and one of ours is that you all really like Markdown. A few people even mentioned it as their one prerequisite for being able to switch from their current tool. Click the text area to enter edit mode, click out to render the markdown. Easy.
Information Architecture. While there are many useful names for things in existing practices and tools, we want to be very deliberate in selecting language with affordances that work with our understand of remote-first, continuously learning, balanced team situations. What is a team? What expectations does a word like “backlog” carry with it, and what feelings does it evoke?
We want to make something better than what exists. In some cases, that will mean changing the words. This is another of those things we’d love to chat about - feel free to reply if you have thoughts.
More stable open/closed state. We were experiencing issues with stories closing while we worked. Something was causing LiveView sessions to get reset, though we're still not 100% sure what. We’ve fixed it by storing the list of stories that are open in a URL parameter. As a bonus, this also fixed a problem where any sessions started from story permalinks were "obsessed" with that one story, and would keep re-opening it and scrolling back to it.
State history. This is the first of a series of features that will let you see the history of a story (and, eventually, roll back your changes). It's also our first implementation of "let me see who delivered the story I'm accepting," though when we get to crewing properly we'll have a more robust implementation.
Next Month
Description history. We want to store and show your edits to story descriptions, so you can see what other people on your team have changed since the last time you looked at a story. The main thing that's a little tricky is that right now we save story descriptions a lot. Here at StoryTime Solutions, we care deeply about e a c h a n d e v e r y one of your keystrokes. But we don't want to show every character as its own distinct change. So we need to roll up those changes into human-meaningful units somehow.
Drafts. Right now, when you create a new story it appears at the bottom of the backlog. Soon, instead, it will appear in a new section called Drafts, and you'll need to drag it into the backlog when it's that story’s time 🥁.
Quality of life improvements for large backlogs. The StoryTime backlog itself now has over 100 stories in it, the majority of them Accepted. It's become a pain to find older stories and move new ones around. We're working on a few different features to address this -- drafts will help some, plus some combination of search and "chunking" the accepted story view so you don't have to choose between seeing all 70+ accepted stories and seeing 0 of them.
Redesigned Story Cards. Admittedly, the current design is a little bit thrown-together. The buttons aren't in consistent locations and it's hard to keep it looking good on mobile, or in multi-column views. We're working on a somewhat more considered version as part of a larger overhaul.
🎉
Keep an eye on your inboxes. Again, you can respond to this email to request to be onboarded. We will do our best to accommodate folks when it makes sense for the current feature-set and building momentum.
Until next month,
Nat and the StoryTime team