This is a monthly update where I share what I’ve been working on recently. For the previous installment, check out my October 2023 Update.

November wasn’t a great month for signups - I think things are slowing down as we head into the holidays. Feature-wise, though, I shipped a lot of stuff around usability, and users seem to be really liking the changes.

Better notifications

Notifications were one of the things that I slapped together early on and never really revisited, so there was lots of stuff to polish:

• Notifications for same URL are grouped together, so you don’t see a notification for every comment on a status update
• Similarly, when you click a notification, it marks all notifications that link to that URL as read
• Only send one notification per comment/reply - previously if someone replied to your comment and mentioned you, for instance, you’d get two notifications
• Add title of the thing being commented on or comment text to notifications, so you can see what it’s about without clicking through
• Added a dropdown to mark notifications as read/unread or delete them without
• You can now mute notifications on a status, retro, etc. if you don’t want to receive further notifications
• Real small, but there’s now a nice hover state and the whole row is clickable on the notifications page

User profiles

I added a user profile page, so now you can click into a user’s name or avatar and see their profile. It’s pretty basic right now, but I’m planning to add more to it in the future.

For now it’s a quick place to see a user’s recent status updates, what team they’re on, their timezone, etc.

New status page

On the page where you post status updates, I added alerts to nag you to add your GitHub/GitLab username to your profile if those integrations are on, or a nag for admins to enable integrations if none are on.

I also got a support request about how to add recent activity to a status update, which happens automatically, so I added a toggle to share recent activity and now show what’s going to be attached.

Onboarding

I also made some changes to onboarding, as part of my never-ending effort to improve activation:

• I turned on reminders by default, so you’ll get emails reminding you about outstanding pokers and refines
• Make retros anonymous by default
• Add a bot user to new accounts so you can delete the user to remove the default “welcome” data
• Re-wrote a lot of the “welcome” data
• Removed the dedicated onboarding checklist page
• Update welcome/drip onboarding emails

Start work with SEO agency

I also started working with an SEO agency in November, so you should start seeing more frequent blog posts and other content. I’m excited to see what they can do!

Fixes & Improvements

I also shipped several small fixes and improvements:

• Fixed a bug where an @mention found the wrong user if there were multiple users with the same name
• Fixed an issue where confirm dialogs weren’t being honored if you canceled them
• Redirect back to original URL after login
• Add copy link to options dropdowns
• Show mailto links in statuses and comments if you mention an email address
• Show votes on closed pokers and refines
• Show what time pokers and refines were closed
• On the team settings page, abbreviate weekdays and put them inline so they take up less space
• When a new team is created, set the team’s timezone to match the user who created it
• Add “manage notification preferences” links to notification emails
• Only send reminders to users who have logged in (this already applied to notifications)
• Send welcome email to all new users
• Enforce username validation during signup

Update: The December 2023 Update is the next post in this series.