We've released another great feature: A bigger (literally!) and better dashboard.

The Project Dashboard is the front page of each Woobius project where you can get a quick 'at-a-glance' view of recent activities. It's the facebook-activity-feed equivalent for your project.

Goodbye old...

Just like the early incarnations of the facebook-activity-feed, our original dashboard design featured a "statistics-like" project activity feed, broken into three simple parts:

• Recent Drop Box uploads (Work-in-progress)
• Recent Vault issues (Formal Drawing Issue)
• General Project Activities

While our users loved its usefulness, they felt it can be a bit intimidating at first, especially if you joined the project mid-way through when it is fully populated with activities.

So back we went to the drawing board to see how to make the dashboard even better...

Codename project book?

When developing the new design, we asked ourselves a question - What is the Project Dashboard to our users other than being a "project feed"? After all it's the first thing they see when entering a project. After some long debates - most of which happened in my head and well into the night, I realised the answer had been staring at me in the face! The answer was something I coined the Project Book concept...

Since the Dashboard is the "front page" of every project, then if a project is a "book", then the Dashboard is both the "cover" and the "contents" page, not just an activity feed.

Just like books are easily identifiable by their covers, the dashboard should feature images of the project. Also, it should have clear "chapter" headings so even first time users can quickly find the information they need. 

I quickly mocked up the idea, codenamed it "Project Book" (short for project-as-a-book) and showed it to the team.

They loved it. We decided to show it to some users. They asked us when it would be ready - always a good sign. Excited by the enthusiasm, we felt the idea that the Dashboard is the cover and content page for the project was one that people could instantly identify with.

Hello new... ;-)

After two months of hard work by the team (and our interns), here's what the new project dashboard on Woobius looks like.

On it, you will still find the recent folders and activities (though reformatted somewhat to be more useful), and you will also find a brand new "project images" section, where you can upload photos and renderings of the project. We warmly encourage you to do so! Our testing has shown that project members are far more likely to use Woobius effectively when a project image has been set.

We would love to hear your feedback, so don't hesitate to get in touch at support@woobius.com

 or leave a comment below!

Word reaches me that Bob Leung has been nominated as the next ‘be2camp star'. Congratulations!

 Alex Albion (the previous holder) praises Bob for his work on Woobius, and sees great things in store for Woobius Eye. I think this is a suitable moment for the Masked Architect  to join in the congratulations and thank Bob for his vision, enthusiam, commitment, and dogged hard work that has brought us this far.

 The award of ‘be2camp star’ is a new feature for be2camp that seeks to reward members who are active in promoting the core elements of the be2camp purpose, namely exploring web applications and social media within the built environment.

Each week a new star will rise, nominated by the previous winner. The idea is to promote not just active members, but also those who may not be active within be2camp circles and happenings who nonetheless are pushing the use of web2/social media within their companies or areas of influence.   

 As to next week’s nomination Bob is keeping his cards close to his chest. In the meantime I hope he enjoys his well deserved moment of recognition.

T'was the week before Christmas in 2008, and we had just updated the email template to the blue-themed template that you've come to know (and hopefully love). 

It feels like only yesterday I was frantically iterating through that template with Bob until we were satisfied with it... And yet, in internet-time, a year and a half is like a whole geological era, and then some.

The blue template served us well. It was cohesive and recognisable, and though we did tweak it many times over the last 18 months, it largely worked as it was. One of the realities of internet startups, though, is that every single day you learn more about your customers and what they want. After 18 months of listening to you, we decided that it was time to make more than a tweak.

Last week, we released a new email template. It's clean, simple, and focused. One of the key philosophies we adopted with the new template is that rather than offer up all the information that could possibly be of interest (as was the case in some of the earlier emails, with long FAQs and lists of data), every email we send you should be clear, quick to read, and make it absolutely obvious what (if anything) you're expected to do. From now on, if you see a link in our templates, you probably want to click on it.

Here's an example of what you might receive if you were sent files in a project being run by the fictitious firm "Woobius Architects":

Apart from the simplicity, one more thing you might notice is a shift in emphasis on the matter of branding. From now on, project emails will be branded with the name of the company running the project, rather than with "woobius" (the "powered by woobius" branding will take a much smaller, less prominent position at the bottom of the email). In addition, project emails sent via Woobius now have subjects that start with the name of the project (in [square brackets]), rather than with the less useful "Woobius:".

The reason for this is simple: Woobius, though built, maintained and extended by us, is, within the context of a project that you create on it, your product, that you offer to your clients. Most of the time, the people you invite to your projects on Woobius don't know what Woobius is - nor should they need to know. They're being invited to your project hub, which happens to be hosted on Woobius. The email templates should reflect that, and now they do.

Do let us know what you think about this, by emailing us, commenting here, or even using the feedback tab in the application!

But discovers every cloud has a silver lining.

Woobius on LifeHacker, Construction Manager, and others.

Perspective and changes.

Two years ago, we first released Woobius to just four people. It was a very early version of Woobius – it only had a Dropbox, had no audit log, barebones user management. You couldn’t even send files by email. But it solved a real problem, and people started using it, and it spread.

Within a year, with no advertising, Woobius grew from 0 to 1700 users. Now, after another year, it is approaching 6000, with users from over 60 different countries. This all happened while the construction industry was shaken to its roots by a nasty recession. Needless to say, we’re very proud of this.

Through this journey, we’ve learned a lot about what you, our users, want. When we officially launched in June last year, we believed that a per-project pricing model was the best model for this industry. As I’ll discuss a little lower in this blog post, this proved to be untrue – we received clear feedback that people wanted a different model.

So, the main news in this announcement is, we are upgrading our pricing model to something that will work better for both you and us.

This pricing will come into effect over the weekend of February 20th.

What will the new pricing be?

The new pricing is based around the idea that when people decide to adopt Woobius in earnest, they want to adopt it on many (often all) the projects that their firm is involved in. Woobius makes collaboration more convenient, and this is true even if you’re the only one using it on your project.

With the new model, you still get free projects with 200 MB of storage, but each user can only own one project. When a user decides they want to adopt Woobius on more projects, they can upgrade their user account, rather than upgrading the projects individually. All their projects then benefit from the additional storage instantly.

The following table lists the different plans, in Pounds Sterling, that will be available when you upgrade:

Of course, if you’re not based in the UK, you can purchase those in US Dollars or Euros.

Other than this, there will be no change to your experience of working with Woobius.

Why does this make more sense?

People adopt Woobius through three distinct stages. These stages are repeated across most of our users. Sometimes new users go through those stages very quickly, but a typical length of time is a few weeks.

In the first stage, users are passive. They have been invited to a project or have signed up but are not actively using the system. They may be downloading files, and even uploading some files, but they’re not actively creating real construction projects.

In the second stage, users become active. They start to create their own projects and actively use Woobius to collaborate with their design team or contrators. Typically, though, they only do this on one or two projects, to try the system out and convince themselves that it works.

In the third stage, users are convinced that the system is right for them and their company, and they want get their whole company to adopt it. This is where the previous pricing model doesn’t quite work – by requiring every project to be upgraded independently, and to have their own sets of invoices and payment schedules, it wasn’t supporting users who wanted to adopt Woobius for all their projects.

The new system still supports stages 1 and 2 – the system is free for 1 project up to 200MB, and cheap if you only have a few projects. But now, when you want to adopt Woobius across many projects in your company, there’s a simple, easy way to do so.

Looking forwards

I hope that this new system will work well for both you and us. It’s been a really phenomenal two years so far, and I’m really enthusiastic about what the future holds.

If you have any comments about the new pricing, please feel free to email us or to post a comment below.

This weekend, we released another great new Woobius feature: the weekly at a glance report of your projects.

Over the last few months, several people had asked for a passive way of finding out what’s going on with your projects. Many other collaboration systems send out a daily email listing events and outstanding actions and tasks. In today’s information-heavy world, it’s probably too much to ask for every user to log in every week to find out what’s been happening with their projects. Information needs to be pushed out to busy people so they can decide whether they need to log in and take action.

Designing the report

However, we didn’t want to rush the implementation of this report. Here’s our thinking process as we approached this task.

First of all, we felt that a daily email would have been far too noisy. We’ve observed that most projects have things happening only once or twice a week at most. Very few projects have things happen every day. We also believe that emails that go out every day tend to be quickly tuned out and ignored, or even disabled or marked as spam. So, we chose to make the email weekly rather than daily.

There came the choice of when to send that email. Two ideal times presented themselves: Sunday, or Monday. There’s no point in sending a mail that will be ignored because it is lost in a tidal wave of other weekend emails, so we chose to send it on Monday afternoon so that it would fit into the typical architect or engineer’s workflows.

Next, came the content. Many other systems send out long or incomplete lists of tasks that need to be read carefully to find out if anything of interest happened. We strongly believe that the point of a weekly summary is to summarise. That means it needs to be as brief as possible, it needs to be skimmable, and yet it still needs to give all the important, actionable information.

The obvious starting point for this was to send a summary or extract of the dashboard events. This would have worked alright, but it wasn’t good enough. It was too noisy to be skimmed effectively, and it would have been difficult to highlight the key information. So we took a step back and thought: what is the most important information that a user might care about when receiving a project summary?

Highlighting the key information

We came up with three main areas of interest:

• General project events (invitations, removals, project admin promotions, etc)
• Dropbox uploads (who uploaded things to what folder)
• Vault uploads (who issued what)

We tried to keep that information as quiet as possible to make it easy to quickly scan through for events of interest. If you see something that you want to find out more about, just click the “Take me to the project” link and you can check the dashboard, which details all events on the project.

What do you think?

Is this email useful to you? What else would you like to see there? Let us know below.

As ever, many things are happening with Woobius. Here’s a quick recap of some recent events.

Woobius at large

First of all, we had a great chat with Paul Wilkinson of Extranet Evolution, and he wrote up not one, but two reviews of Woobius (one before, and one after the chat). Find the latest review, along with many other quality articles about collaboration technology in architecture, engineering, and construction, right here. Many thanks to Paul for his time and his feedback.

Site redesign

Over the last few weeks, we also redesigned the Woobius site to make it clearer and more useful. This started with the front page, which, hopefully, is now convincing and offers the right information to help both new users and regulars understand what Woobius is about. At the same time, we added a features tour to help give an overview of some of Woobius’s key features, and updated the pricing page from its previously very sketchy appearance (after all, it was only a placeholder) to something a little more polished.

We’ve added a lot of other things… screenshots, quotes from some of our customers, the tour… there’s more on the way. Watch this space — maybe follow this blog (use the bright orange balloon on the right to add this to your feed reader) to make sure you get the news as it happens.

Speaking of quotes, if you’ve been using Woobius and you have something good to say about it, we’d love to hear from you. Just send us an email to support@woobius.com and let us know. It doesn’t have to be a one-liner, either. If we get enough to warrant it we’ll make a special page just to highlight all that great feedback.

Over to you

Woobius wouldn’t be where it is without you, our users. What do you think about the new design? What do you think about Woobius? Tell us below, or by emailing us, and we’ll always make every effort to respond.

What do you think?

We're almost ready to launch with our pricing scheme.

It’s been almost a year since Woobius started being used on real, live construction projects.

First of all, thank you for all your feedback: we couldn’t have done it without you! Woobius has matured and grown, adding major features like the Vault, and making countless enhancements to the usage workflows to make it more useful to you.

We are now approaching the launch of our pricing scheme. Our biggest concern is that you are clear about what will happen and to make sure there are no surprises. Below is a quick overview of the pricing plan. If you have any questions, just drop us an email at support@woobius.com.

Still FREE to create projects.
All projects get 200 MB of storage for free. This equates to roughly 100 documents and should be enough for most small projects.

Get more storage for £10/GB/month.
If you need more storage for your project, then it’s a simple £10/GB/month. What’s more, you only pay for what you’ve used.

Billing per project.
You will receive individual receipts for each of your projects. You can even nominate an external contact to pick up the bill (e.g. your client).

Cancel anytime – no long term contracts, no cancellation fees.
Projects can be cancelled at any point. When you don’t need Woobius on a project anymore, you don’t have to keep paying for it.

What happens to existing projects?
When the pricing kicks in, any projects you already have on Woobius will remain active. If your project is above 200 MB, you will still have full access to all the files, but you will need to purchase storage before you can upload more files.