We’ve now chugged through two weeks of public testing of the next-generation Brighter Planet site. Between the ample feedback provided by our hearty beta testers and the tireless effort Seamus, Rich, Adam, and Andy have put into adding features and tweaking code, the site’s come a long way over this stretch. Our to-dos and wish-list items remain awesomely large in number, but we’re moving along at a pretty good clip.
Now, I’ve marinated myself in pop culture for a very, very long time. Thinking about our progress brings to mind the opening sequence of 1970s sci-fi series The Six Million Dollar Man. But of course, no?
What? You’ve never seen this paragon of Bad TV? Well, the idea is that astronaut Steve Austin (played by Lee Majors, a beefy actor whose range included about three barely discernible facial expressions) is gravely injured when his experimental jet crashes. A cabal of government scientists and intelligence agents then intervenes, and, as a voice heard over the opening credits explains,
"Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better… stronger… faster."
Dumb show, really. But as a kid I loved the idea of a "rebuilt" bod imbued with special powers. The Bionic Man could throw a football about 500 yards, run 60 miles an hour, had X-ray vision; he stopped bad guys and regularly saved the world from horrible destruction.
And as embarrassing as it is to reveal how TV-addled a childhood I had, the superhero theme isn’t all that out of place here. We really do want to give people the means to take hold of their personal piece of our collective destiny and effect meaningful change. We want you to feel your own power to be part of solving global warming. We want our web application to take you to a place where you’ll be thinking, "Al-right! Bring on the cape and costume! I’m ready!!"
The bug-fixing phase of software development can be a real slog. It’s good — both for us here in the shop and for you the end user — to remember where we’re going. Kick butt, or bust.
So here’s what we’ve done to date:
» Better: Bit by bit, we’re making the experience of interacting with the site smoother, slicker, and more intuitive. Your feedback has been a huge help in identifying and fixing a long list of small things that were broken, confusing, or just not quite… right.
» Stronger: You asked for more control over what to reveal about yourself on your Brighter Planet public profile — done! And you hollered when the footprint calculator produced numbers that just didn’t add up. Yipe!! Not good. Nothing’s more important to us than your confidence in the integrity and accuracy of our emissions estimates. An intense hunt for the source of such weirdness ensued. We’ve already fixed a bucketload of issues relating to footprint accuracy, and will continue to pore over the data and calculations until we’re certain our estimates are as accurate as possible.
» Faster: We sped up the site. Pages should load faster now. We’re not done yet, though — by the time we’re done, it’ll be Steve Austin–fast, pinky swear.
- Ian Wilker, community manager, Brighter Planet