After living with Staction for quite a while now (We’ve been using it, almost a year internally) some hidden things are emerging. Lots of good things, – a few kinks. Here’s where we’re at:

A sense of place
Most productivity, and organization apps don’t have a sense of place. You log in, and you have the sense that other people are there, but you never see them. You return to a page you just checked, and new content is there, mysteriously left by the person inhabiting the same virtual space as you, unseen, unheard.

We think Staction is an improvement on this. Staction feels like a place to go to. We’re a dispersed team, and we like that it has an atmosphere like an office. You can work quietly, have a private conversation, or yell over the cubicles. Productivity doesn’t have to be so lonely.

Drinking from the firehose
Staction is communication, full-bore. It’s what we wanted, – to expose what’s going on, and make it more visible. But communication can happen so fast that you miss things. We built lots of ways for people to expose this content, but we’re working on more. We want people to be fearless about posting and communicating everything they do. Right now there is a tiny bit of hesitation to not muddy the stream. We need to knock down that inhibition so people update even more often.

It’s ok to build an app that unfolds
So much pressure is put on making every button, and link on a web app immediately apparent. It seems like the web app has to be its own manual… It’s not a bad thing, – but it’s limiting. Think about the iPod clickwheel. 5 buttons and a spinny thing. It’s so brilliant anyone can use it. But, for example, you might have to check the manual to learn how to make a playlist. Once you know how, it’s amazingly easy, but it’s a hidden feature. It’s a feature for advanced users.

Apple is always smart to make distinctions between users. The concentration is on making something very simple to start using. With Staction, it couldn’t be easier to start using it. But we’re thinking of ways to let it unfold for advanced users. Staction is basically just 2 text fields, but we think that within that simplicity, even more can be accomplished.

Permissions suck
We knew going into it that permissions were the hardest thing we were tackling. Making good communication means that there are levels of privacy. But the more privacy you have, the more complex and the less transparent things get. Everyone starts to have their own version of the Staction experienced based on how much they’re getting talked to.

A good example is todo’s. When you assign a todo to someone, it’s a private message to them, since it’s tagged with their name. It makes a great deal of sense considering that not everyone wants to wade through everyone else’s todo’s to get at the information relevant to them. However, it can create problems when people don’t know what everyone else is working on.

The same thing happens with direct communication. If you have a large group online, you might want to direct your message to a specific person, but have the whole group see it. There are simple ingenuity based answers for these things of course. We ask each other to perform tasks, and respond with a todo assigned to ourselves a lot. We also begin sentences with a persons name if we want a directed but public message. Still, we think it can be better. We’ve got a few ideas how to do it.

Tags are Projects
One of the big leaps we made was consolidating the ideas of tags, and projects. It clarifies the interface so much, and gives you lots of flexibility to be creative with your workflow. There was a tradeoff though. Since every tag can have permissions, and time tracked against it, you can’t use multiple tags in a lot of places you might like to. This is a tough one, and one that we’re just starting to think about how to improve on.

The best thing
We figured the best thing about Staction would be the transparency it brought to our workflow. If not that, then maybe the virtual collections of posts you can make via saved views. If not that, then maybe just having communication be at the heart of the app. These things are good, but they’re not the best thing. It turns out, the best thing is speed.

Staction is just plain fast to use. You never wait on it, it’s just there, ready for input. Since it’s so fast to use, people use it more often. All the other solutions we’ve tried for PM, felt like a punishment when you wanted to properly file a piece of info. With Staction, it’s easier to file information in the right place than be lazy. When your system is the path of least resistance, it’s a powerful thing.

Staction has turned out to be more than a web app to us. It’s a study of how people get work done, and what make the process better. Not just more efficient, – but better. We’re enjoying learning what the process has to teach us. We’re enjoying figuring out ways to tweak it to make people’s work life better.