Day 123: Intention Community
I’m putting together a community for Intention. Here’s how I’m thinking about it.
Why?
Q&A product feedback
Building a product like Intention requires making hundreds of design decisions. Some are minor and easily reversible, like deciding whether a distracting site should be shown at 30% opacity or 20% opacity. Others are fundamental to how the product works, like whether the countdown timer should continue even when you’re not on a distracting site.
For a long time, my process for making big decisions involved spending hours endlessly debating them in my head. It took ages to come to a conclusion. I still do this sometimes. But nowadays, I also run a quick poll with friends in the Hacker Fellowship and Show & Tell to see what others think:
Usually, this process provides a decisive answer and helps me quickly settle the debate.
Now that I have a bunch of people using Intention, it makes sense to ask them when making decisions!
Testing new features
When I developed the group streaks feature, I wanted to try it with a small number of people first before releasing it to everyone. I’m glad I did because I decided that it wasn’t working and that I needed to rethink my whole approach. If I had launched it to everyone, it would’ve been much harder to make big changes to the feature or scrap it entirely.
I’d like to have a group of active Intention users who would be down to try out new features, provide feedback, and be willing to put up with breaking changes. I’d like to an have an open channel of communication with them so that I can find out how a new feature is changing their behavior.
Build a community!
There’s a lot of potential in gathering a bunch of people who also share a passion for productivity and digital mindfulness. I’m hoping I can grow an actual community!
Who?
About a week and a half ago, I uploaded a new version of Intention that included an update message with a signup form for the Intention community:
That link took people to this Google form (feel free to sign up!) that has since received 186 responses:
I’m stoked that there are this many people interested in being involved in Intention’s development.
Where?
I’ve had a hard time deciding where to host the community. On one hand, using a real-time communication tool like Slack sounds appealing because it means I can easily chat with users to run quick polls like the one above and dive deeper into helping people debug issues. On the other hand, I’m just one person, and having hundreds of messages to process seems like it could become overwhelming real quick. Heck, I’ve had a hard enough time processing all the feedback I get via Google Forms:
https://twitter.com/dk_the_human/status/1254948328539738112
Here are my requirements for the platform:
- Easy for me to ask questions and collect votes
- Easy for people to give feedback and report bugs
There are many tools that would fulfill the second requirement:
- Doesn’t require creating an account: Google Forms (current solution), plain old email
- Requires creating an account: Trello, Canny, GitHub Issues
For the first requirement, it seems like Slack would be the way to go. Perhaps a subreddit, a Facebook group, or a dedicated Twitter account could work as well, but I think reaching people would be harder with them compared to Slack because Slack also sends emails for missed notifications.
I considered a few platforms similar to Slack, but they didn’t seem like a good fit:
- Discord: Missing threads, which I’d like to keep conversations organized
- Twist: Could work, but posting might feel intimidating for people compared to a chat message in Slack, and I’m less familiar with the tool
I’ve been hemming and hawing over this decision for the past week and a half, but I’m going to start with what’s likely an imperfect solution, learn from my mistakes, and iterate rather than putting this off forever.
Slack it is!