Feedback Loops

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.

And now for something a little different…

I am sending out an official welcome to everyone watching this blog. We are going to ramp up creating some content here, shifting from a strict “company” blog to one that carries more information about our product development, our company development, our passions, and our excitement.

As you may or may not know, we have been doing a ton of work behind the scenes to redesign the site from Guildcafe.com to GamerDNA.com. This involves not only a new design, but significant new features that focus on making the site personal, effortless, and instantly rewarding. If you want to see some of the work, you can access the open beta by:

1. Register for GuildCafe.com
2. Once you confirm your registration, click the Beta button in the top navigation.
3. This will load up the open beta of GamerDNA.com.
4. Explore!

Make sure you check out the GamerDNA Panel which gives you access to all of the items that make up who you are as a gamer. This can include the games you play, the characters you have from various MMOs…. upload screen shots too so we can put a face with the name!

Also make sure you fill out your AKAs for Xbox Live, XFire, and other gaming services as we are building out auto-capture technologies that will capture your gaming history without you having to do anything! How is that for effortless?

GamerDNA is a new company. We are just getting started. We have a great team, a great existing community from GuildCafe.com, and it will be fun evolving this into something truly unique and exciting. Follow along at home by watching this blog!

Never Tease a Gamer

I wrote a survey for GamerDNA members to tell us why you didn’t fill out a profile, as part of our ongoing quest to make this site’s technology as fun, effortless, and personal as humanly possible. (Humanly AND technologically possible is the way we roll, baby. The man in the machine is a philosophical conundrum that… oh, who am I kidding, the fact is I had a total crush on Brent Spiner while ST:TNG was running, and I’ve been mildly obsessed with human/technology intersections ever since.)

Ahem. Sorry, I digress a lot. So, anyway, at the end of the survey I put in a text field that said, paraphrased, “Tell us why you didn’t give us your DNA. If you did give us your DNA, you can skip this or use this space to compose a haiku.”

Um. I was kidding, when I said that, but I should know by now to never tease a gamer. We got dozens of haiku.

I won’t post them all today, but look for them here over the next few days.

Here’s one:

Profiles are like life
Changing as the games progress
Fill it out again.