We won’t be opening up our new app to beta testers this week. Funny, -because it’s basically ready to let people in.

We’ve been using our new app, code named Staction, internally for a while now. It’s been… weird. Staction is a collection of ideas, and some really smart ways of thinking about our daily work process. At times it’s been more of a study in psychology than in interface design. Entering the project we knew what we felt was broken with current group collaboration, and project management apps, -and we thought we knew how to fix them. Short story is that we guessed wrong on some pretty major pieces.

What do you do when you don’t like your own app?

A couple Fridays ago was about the worst day we’ve had on the project so far. It was the day we realized that some things had to change with the app before it felt natural to us. It was a realization that some challenging and tough work was going down the drain. It was a realization of lost time…

A few lessons re-learned:

• There are several levels of immediacy to group communication. Granting access to immediacy is a bad thing more often than not.

• A flexible system is an advantage to the experienced user. A novice user needs walls to be suggested. The app needs to be committal on how you should do things but be tolerant of customization.

• No matter how fast your ajax is, and how smooth your interface, -switching from mouse to keyboard too many times slows down your activity in an app. Novice users need hooks to use the mouse. The advanced user wants to stay on the keyboard as much as possible.

• Part of interface design is teaching. You have to think about how people will improve their skills within your app. It’s great if on day one your users understand your app without reading the manual. An app that you live in daily must provide a way to become faster and better within the same interface. Watch someone who is really great at Photoshop, -it’s like a different app exists within the first…

Today, with some distance and perspective, we’re more hopeful than ever about the project. We needed that first run to quantify our assumptions. We needed for it to be right. We need for it to be good. So it will be a bit longer before anyone gets to have a peek at our work. Nobody is more anxious than us to show it off.