Part of my job, and every day I thank the powers that be in the universe that someone pays me for this, is to be the first in line to welcome new guildmasters and clan leaders. I’m not psychic – I get a report of all the people who have made pages to support their group in a particular week. We’re not just being friendly, although this bunch is more fun at a barbecue than a s’more buffet. We need to know what brought people here, and what minor annoyances they’re finding that might prevent them from staying.

The information we harvest leads directly to changes that we patch in every week, and informs the course of our future designs. Sometimes the changes are minor – adding a quicklink to your PMs in the new design, or improving the load time of a page by a second. At this stage in our development, the changes are often much bigger. For example, we hear our guild leaders saying that inviting non-GamerDNA members to join a guild is too complicated. Many people say that in order to make the process effortless, you have to convince people to join our site and then accept the guild invitation. That’s a pain in the brain, and we’re talking through the redesign now.

You won’t see results from that until the summer, as our first priority is getting the redesigned website up and running under our DNA brand. I’ll post on that later, but I gotta get back to the feedback! If you’ve got any thoughts on specific areas of the invitation/join process, we’d love to hear them. You can either email me at sweathers AT gamerdna DOT com, or comment on this post.