Posted by Sundar Subramanian on Sun, Dec 31, 2006 @ 03:05 AM
Generally at the end of each year, I write an email to some of my friends telling them how my year went: the ups and lows and ask about their experiences in the year past. This year I thought I will write a blog post on this topic.
The major theme for me this year has been my work in Dimdim. When I was thinking about joining a startup many fears swelled (DD has written about this) but there was an air of excitement, of doing something new and interesting. The expectation was to create something truly usable (and change the world :-))
But this was tempered by the fear of loosing a stable and safe career. Especially in India, where the software profession is respected, society does not understand people who leave their existing job in a truly multi-national software company for a career in a startup company. This move of mine was viewed as stupid (at best) and childish (at worst) by many. The name “Dimdim” also didn’t inspire much confidence, it was not Acme Software Solutions or InfoTel Software Services :-).
I herded my trembling thoughts together and started work in Dimdim since I saw the possibility of fulfilling a need. But over time, with my fellow-dimdimers I have grown in confidence. The response at the OSCON Demo in July where Dimdim was first unveiled showed us that we were on the right track. Then the Open Source Alpha Release in September and the stunning response (Tens of thousands of downloads in less than 100 days) we have got from the community showed us that people are waiting for a product like Dimdim. The forums posts and interaction with the Dimdim community showed us the things we are doing right and the things we have to correct. The amount of time and energy that the members of the community have put into building Dimdim is truly humbling. People have not only suggested features but also gone ahead and implemented much-needed features (LDAP integration). We have found many bugs through community reporting and Dimdim testing has been tested by the community on many platforms which were not part of the original plan.
Right now, we are working towards the early 2007, hosted Beta release. I am sure it will not be a flawless rollout, but I am also equally sure all of you will point and prod us into correcting the mistakes that happen and ensure that Dimdim truly becomes the world’s web meeting.
Happy New Year everybody !
Posted by Sundar Subramanian on Sat, Dec 09, 2006 @ 07:48 AM
We feel, in software, user experience and user talk fulfillment is more important than feature set expansion. A software product which fulfills the needs and expectations of the user is better than a product which is more feature rich but difficult to use. This has been the core of Dimdim's product management philosophy and it is this principle which guides us.
Features which are not central to the core functionality set of Desktop/Application/Presentation sharing and which will suck out our scarce resources are not given priority unless our user communities ask for them. This means that our engineers can focus on making the core features easier to use and the product in general will be more stable. This underlines the philosophy we are following for our Beta release slated for release around January 2007.
New features in this release will include two way Audio and Video along with a much more scalable backend server. The UI (User Interface) is also being completely redesigned to ensure optimum usage of screen real estate. More features like collaborative whiteboard and recording and archiving will follow. To achieve this, we may have to sacrifice the "Remote Control" feature, where the presenter can control the Attendee's computer. This feature will follow in later versions of the product.
Of course, this kind of development where the stress is on user experience means that the focus should be on a task oriented fulfillment of user expectations. What I mean by this is, adding features only for the sake of adding features is not the way. Features will be added if they are required to complete the user experience as expected. For example, look at this ridiculous situation of Windows Vista presenting the user with Nine (yeah, that's right) different options when a user wants to shut down the machine. Now, as reported by a developer who has worked on this particular feature, such a situation arises because decisions are not made with user intention (and expectation) in mind but by a group (in this case 43) people who take decisions depending on requirements/limitations defined by other groups of developers working on related code.
In Dimdim too we had a situation where many options could be set by the Presenter of a web meeting and the straight forward way of doing this would be to present all these options upfront before the start of the meeting. But this would have resulted in a situation where by even before the meeting begins, the presenter is confronted with a long list of options which have to be defined. This is not desirable user experience. So we took a call that expected values of parameters (like all participants will be able to chat with each other by default while they will not be able to start their video feeds by default) would be already defined when the meeting starts while at the same time giving the flexibility to change these values at any time.
Of course, Dimdim does not even have 43 employees! That's where our user community helps us ensure that all of our product designs are community decisions and not "committee decisions". So when you receive an email invite to participate in our hosted Beta, please let us know what you think about Dimdim and how we can make it better.
Ps: Did I mention that you can register for the free hosted invite from our website at www.dimdim.com