Comments on: Musings on UTR 2008

By: mathew

mathew — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:29:37 +0000

Thanks for mentioning blist - basically we have a window of opportunity to do much needed rapid feature development before we release a premium version of blist and charge actual, real money for it - at which point, it obviously won’t be okay to be ‘very beta’.

Mat

By: Paul Pedrazzi

Paul Pedrazzi — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:59:31 +0000

Ridgely, I am sure you have the right priorities. In fact, I even wonder how slick the UI needs to be for your audience - your bare bones approach may be just fine. eBay made it with a terrible user experience and I used to think Excite would crush Google, so it’s more of a personal preference for me.

That said, more and more UI is a differentiator. It is the first thing you see after all and a big message of quality (or lack therof) sent to potential users. I certainly wouldn’t buy from a website that looked like a FrontPage template. I look forward to the refresh!

Thanks for the comment.

By: Ridgely Evers

Ridgely Evers — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:02:11 +0000

Thanks for the kind words, Paul.

Rest assured that we’re working on reskinning the UI as we speak. It’ll take a little while longer than we’d like, but we wanted to get the “innards” right first. Not very Web 2.0, I know, but the right priority given our stewardship of customers’ data.

Best,

–Ridge

By: Paul Pedrazzi

Paul Pedrazzi — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:56:24 +0000

Hi Charles, I am sure your approach yields a much improved result vis a vis something like MS Project. I do not doubt that. To be fair, the problem I am looking to solve is more for the casual projects that mire my existence more than the structured, long term, projects. The ones where no one wants or needs a full project plan is where I see the most pain. Obviously you are not tackling that market, but I do see some others taking a stab at it (sadly using the same old models, but now on the web).

I tend to think that for the ad hoc projects we need something outside the standard task, owner, deliverable mindset. I even think that a zero UI might be the answer.

Of course I don’t have a solution either, but I keep looking…

Thanks for the comment!

Paul

By: Charles Seybold

Charles Seybold — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:23:25 +0000

Hi Paul - Thanks for noting LiquidPlanner. It’s tough to describe a concept like revolutionizing the Gantt chart and building a product around it a 6 minute demo. It’s not your standard consumer software which is what is mostly seen at UTR. The LiquidPlanner schedule is designed to look familiar, but it functions in a dramatically different way than a typical Gantt. I would be happy to setup a web conference with you if you’d like a briefing. Key things you’ll see include: capturing uncertainty, seeing effects of uncertainty on dependant and independant chains, automatic tracking, and how (by capturing every change) the system builds up a data warehouse of project information that can be leveraged to help organizations learn how to be better estimators.

Best Regards, Charles, CEO | LiquidPlanner.