StepRep Blog

In my role of “guy who drifts around the office pretending to look busy” I’ve been overhearing a lot of discussion lately about tabs. The consensus seems to be that tabs are a great method for navigating around websites, except when they’re not.

We’re beginning to realise that there are too many tabs in StepRep. We’re going to be working over the next few months to reduce them. We’ve already taken some steps. This is how you’ve been used to navigating around StepRep:

We’ve always referred to these as “tabs”, even though they kind of look like buttons. Whatever you call them, people found them kind of confusing. Now they’re gone. Next time you sign into StepRep you’ll see a Toolkit with six big chunky buttons:

The idea is to put the main features of the site right up front where you can’t miss ‘em. You’ll notice we’ve created big chunky buttons for the Profile and Settings pages, which were kind of hard to find before.

As Tavis described last week, there’s also a new Help Us Out link on the Toolkit page, which I encourage you to click. You can use it to give us some feedback on the new navigation.

We’ll use this blog to announce future tab reductions as they’re implemented.

In other news…Annabelle Pepster!

Annabelle Pepster

Newcomers to StepRep are sometimes overwhelmed by all the buttons and links. This has been a failing on our part – we offer all sorts of cool features, but we’re sometimes lousy at explaining how to use them. Annabelle should help.

So far she only appears on the Reputation Monitor page, but she’ll be offering guided tours throughout the site as she finds time. Just look for this little link:

We’ve been getting some great feedback from friends, family and StepRep users who really care about building a better product. And we like the feedback so much that we’re introducing a tool to help make it easier to provide feedback. We call it “Help us out” and what we’re really talking about is getting our customers to contribute to building a better StepRep.

“Help us out” is just a couple of quick questions that we’d like our customers to answer to help ensure our product is headed in the right direction. We’re keeping it short and sweet but also providing a comments box for participants who have some extra feedback to offer.

We’ll update the link with new questions every Friday and post the results here on the blog for those who are interested.

So head over to StepRep and click on the “Help us out” link. It only takes a minute – we promise.

Lately on this blog we’ve been neglecting the specifics of how StepRep works while focusing on bigger-picture strategic stuff. Perhaps it’s time to check in with the friendly technicians at the far end of the building who spend their days making StepRep better, one small change at a time.

What have you been up to lately, friendly technicians?

Well, Michael, you may have noticed that we’ve improved the StepRep login process.

In olden times, there was only one way to sign up  for StepRep – with your Google account. For folks who already had a Google account, this was great; one less password to remember. Everyone else had to go create a Google account in order to join StepRep, which was a confusing chore. Many new users found themselves lost in a labyrinth of signup screens and gave up in frustration.

You can still sign up using your Google info, but now you have the option of creating a completely autonomous StepRep account.

For existing StepRep users, you’ll be logging in like this:

If you want to go on logging in with your Google account, click the little G at the bottom of the green box. If you try to enter your Google info into the fields at the top, you’ll be prompted to create a StepRep-specific password which will be associated with your existing StepRep account.

Exciting stuff! What other improvements have been made in the most recent StepRep release?

Well, we’ve made some pretty significant changes to the Recommendations screen. We want to make it easier for users to build their recommendation networks, so they can promote and be promoted by their colleagues and share in the magic of StepRep rewards. With that in mind, now you can search for StepRep users by keyword and location. Here’s how it looks:

If you know the name of the user you’re trying to find, you can just type it into the first box. If we can’t locate the person you’re looking for in our directory, you’ll be prompted to invite them to join StepRep.

By the way, friendly technicians, I just noticed an error on the Recommendations page: the word “colleagues” is misspelled.

That’s how you told us to spell it, Michael.

Zoiks!

A while back Brendan posted an article on this blog about the Yellow Pages industry. As you might have deduced from that post, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how the reputation-building tools bundled in StepRep can be incorporated into existing online business directories.

If everything goes according to plan, soon customers and advertisers on local “StepRep-powered” Yellow Pages websites will have access to all the features that StepRep users already enjoy:

• Profile pages that display recommendations from customers instead of anonymous (and usually cranky) reviews.
• Search results organized by social context, so customers can see how they’re connected to local businesses through their friends and their friends’ friends.
• One-to-many communications enabling customers to pose an open question to an entire service category.
• Reputation monitoring for businesses to keep track of what their customers are saying about them on other sites.
• StepRep rewards, a success-based advertising model that incentivizes customers to recommend businesses to their friends.

The idea is to restore the Yellow Pages to what they were in the pre-Internet era – the first place you turn to when you need to find a local business. I drew a little comic strip that covers the basics. (Thanks to Tavis and Nicole for modelling for me.)