Have you ever had one of those home projects with so many constraints you just couldn’t finish it like you really wanted? I’ve had several. Just recently, we did some work to our pool. It had decades-old plaster that needed to be replaced. While we were at it, we thought we’d update the look of the pool since, like much of the house we had recently moved into, it was stuck in about 1987. Due to cost and size constraints, we didn’t execute our entire plan, and the “update” ended up being a simple “replace.” It actually looks great, but we didn’t update the fundamental shape, design or overall feel. Our kids don’t care, but to my wife and me, it feels like we spent a lot of time and money for very little change.

Orbit 2.0 feels a little like that to the development staff here at The Planet. It has good functionality and is a perfectly acceptable self-service portal, but its design is stuck somewhere in 2005. We spent a lot of time integrating several portals to get here, and like my pool upgrade, the most substantial changes aren’t very aesthetically evident.

The biggest benefit of Orbit 2.0 was freeing up resources inside The Planet. When we released the GA version of Orbit 2.0, we passed a key milestone for the company: Completion of the systems integration that began when The Planet and EV1 merged. For three years, as we continued to grow the company, the systems development group was forced to do double and triple development for every product addition and process change. Orbit 2.0 streamlined those processes.

Now, we can focus on improving the user experience. We have a dedicated staff focused exclusively on improving three key areas of our customer interface:

1. Self-service Portal
2. Mobile Applications
3. APIs

In this month’s release, look for a few improvements to our customer tools. We are going to deploy a new tool called The Wall, a site where you can give us your ideas and input. We’ll use your feedback to help us prioritize development activities. In addition to The Wall, we’ll deploy some additional APIs to the RESTful beta we began in April.

On a side note, specialists are now designing our user interfaces. As a developer, I always thought I had a great idea for the screen flow or the color scheme. Then one day someone trained in user-interface design reworked one of my screens. The updated results were so much better that I was converted immediately, and I’ve never tried to lay out another screen. We now have a few people who work exclusively on our UIs. You can see the benefit of our new discipline in this area with our iPhone Web App. It looks great and works like it should.

In the next few blogs, I’ll tell you about a few other projects we have underway. First, we’ll talk about server provisioning. Then we’ll move on to some new products we’re working on. After that we can circle back to our portal work and discuss those plans in a little more detail.

Until next time … engage …

-Duke