We’ve taken another big step in our beta testing phase, by upgrading Rendezview with a simpler and hopefully more intuitive interface. Paul Graham is spot on in what he says about ‘launching fast’ in Startups in 13 Sentences:
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you’re wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.
We’re learning what it is we should have been building by monitoring how our beta testers use our software, and adapting as we go along. One of the complaints we got from our users was that it was a bit hard to figure out the context, that is, “What am I searching?”, and “In which project am I?”.
We’ve done two major changes to make this clearer: breadcrumb trail and color coding. Take a look at the new top navigation bar:
Color coded navigation
Firstly you can see that different contexts now have different colors. If you’re on your dashboard, or viewing meetings that are not in a project, the context is always blue. When you’re looking up people, the context is red. And when you’re inside a project, the context is always green. As you can see from the screenshot below, the search header also takes on the color of the context, so you should never get lost again 
Project dashboard
The breadcrumb trail is always at the top, and shows you exactly where you are:
The new breadcrumb trail
We’ve also improved the context action buttons. This widget is now always accessible on the left side of the screen (there are a couple of exceptions), with a header that shows you if you are in a project or not. Actions specific to the page you are on will appear in a submenu:
The new context action widget
But that’s not all! We’ve greatly improved the layout and readability of meeting notes. Rather than listing the notes in an IM-style with the name of the person that entered the note on the left, and the note itself on the right, we’ve realised that this is not how people enter meeting notes, and it is not how people want their notes to be formatted. We hope you like the new format, we really do!
The new meeting notes layout.
Thanks to all our beta testers for the invaluable feedback that is helping to shape our application!
