Kachingle launched our friends and family and colleagues Beta site last month. It’s going great thanks to our early adopters and our slew of usability testers. Our main focus over the last 30 days has been to study and then improve the usability of our service, both for Kachinglers and Site Owners (our bible is “Don’t Make Me Think!” by Steve Krug) . We are now on our second Beta update (rev 1.02) and have made numerous improvements, primarily in the Medallion and in the flow of some sections of the sign-up process.
The Medallion (which resides on the sites – you can see ours at the top left of our blog) now has four clearly identifiable states:
- gray (user is not a Kachingler or has not set the Medallions to the “Remember Me” state – e.g. Medallions not cookie-enabled)
- purple (user is a Kachingler, Medallions in “Remember Me” state, but user has not chosen to kachingle that particular site
- green (user is a Kachingler, Medallions in “Remember Me” state, user has chosen to kachingle that particular site [nirvana for the Site Owner]
- red (user is a Kachingler, Medallions in “Remember Me” state, but user PayPal account not enabled (therefore user unable to kachingle their sites)
We also added smileys to each of the states. I believe they quickly convey the nature of the state — e.g. the gray has the ? smiley, the purple has the straight mouth smiley, the green has the happy smiley and the red has the ! smiley. However, the smileys are pretty small in the actual Medallion so we are still experimenting.
Kachingle Medallion Smileys
Check out the Medallion and tell us what you think!
We also have some exciting new sites as part of the Beta program. Our first German site is Carta.info, our first Austrian site is politik.netzkompetenz.at, our first musician sites are Aeos Records and Symetrk.com, our first journalist site is SteveOuting.com, and of course our first canine site is The Daily Bunny by our own Bunny the K9 Kachingler.
We will be featuring other Beta Sites in further posts so stayed tuned!
