A few days ago a (potential) customer asked if we had a case study on how we use Staction. While we’re not sure this qualifies as a case study, we thought we could provide some insight as to how Staction helps in the everyday work life at Paste.

• You might already know, we’re a dispersed team; we’re rarely/never in the office at the same time. Staction makes an ideal meeting place for us.
• Unlike other IM apps, Staction does not require immediate attention if you don’t want it to. Staction saves the recent posts for when you’re ready to see them. This allows spontaneous conversations to occur within our team, while allowing us to concentrate on work.
• We use the project summary pages a lot. When we first built Staction, we considered them fairly unimportant- so the icons aren’t very big- in later designs they’ll probably grow in emphasis because they’re a great way to look at your work. See all your images in one spot including your todos, and even recent correspondence.
• Also unlike other IM apps Staction lets us swap todos, and track time easily. We’re not a butts-in-seats kind of company, so it’s a great way for all of us to see who’s doing what, when.
• Staction splits that middle ground between IM, and PM. IM gives us communication, but no accountability. PM gives us accountability, but makes communication a burden. And in general PM apps are slow, and antiquated.
• With Staction, we can post, reply to a post with a todo, and reply to a todo with a time entry. See how many clicks that takes in a traditional PM app…
• We use hash-tags to keep track of miscellaneous non-project-related information in Staction. Some of our favorites are: #logins #links #ideas #later #done #research #projectcost #movies #games. Combine these with the really great project tag system in Staction, and your saved views become a more powerful tool than you’ve probably experienced in PM before. Start with a search, and end up finding exactly what you were looking for using filters.
• Most of the time we send files directly through the Staction attachment system. This leads to a really great archive of the work that’s been done. Every time you finish something, upload a screenshot, or a link. You’ll be stunned at how useful that archive becomes over time.
• We usually use direct messages, rather than project permissions to isolate pieces of the conversation. Drinking from the firehose is great, but when topics only relate to certain members of our team, we don’t hesitate to make it personal.
• We use Staction for everything that needs done in our company. From bug reports to normal project work. When communication needs to be long form, we usually just attach a more in depth text document to a post. But it’s not uncommon for a post to be dozens of lines long. Twitter limits your character count; Staction doesn’t.
• Yes, we still use email. Since lots of requests come in via email, you have to have an organization system that can deal with them. It’s common to see todos that contain the subject line of an email, or a sender’s name. Staction is still the spot where work gets recorded and talked about, but we often refer to items outside of its reach.
• We can’t stress enough how useful Saved Views are… Project tags will handle 90% of your communication effectively, but when you combine them with #hashtags, search, and filters it’s an amazingly different view on your work. Did we mention that every saved view has an RSS feed? Our workflow doesn’t dictate this sort of immediacy- but if yours does, you can be notified of almost anything via all the existing RSS tools available today.
• We reply a lot. I bet 75% of the posts made in a day are replies. It makes it nice for backtracking since you can always go back and look at an individual thread view regardless of how many projects, posts, or people it contains. It’s nice to see that type of arbitrary but succinct chronology outside of the main thread.
• While the file upload system in Staction is great, we also use apps like tinygrab to quickly share links to work in progress without having to wait on an upload.
• We’re a small team, but we work on lots of projects at once. Usually we set all our projects to default permissions where everyone gets to see everything. For many teams though, project permissions are an important way of keeping the main stream manageable. When you tag a post with a project, only the people on that project see the post. Lots of groups of people can share the same account, but still see company wide posts when they want.