The past month has been the most productive yet. I’ve been adding new features and conducting extensive user research to guide our product development. Here’s a look at what’s new and what we’ve learned…
New Features
Change Previews
As you work on your project, NiceGit now shows previews in real time, updated every time you save
- Lets you see exactly what is new before you share the changes with your team
- Supports text and image files (determining whether a file is a text file turned out to be surprisingly involved!)
- The current previews are pretty rough and hard to read. Tidier versions and more detailed view coming soon.
Change Previews was the last missing feature that enabled my to personally use NiceGit every day. I’m using it right now to create and publish this blog post!
Remote Repositories
Whether your project is hosted on GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab or somewhere else, NiceGit now shares your changes immediately with your teammates, no matter where they are or which tools they are using. Users of traditional Git tools will notice there are no separate Stage → Commit → Push stages, just a single ‘Share’ button. It’s a simple design choice that immediately takes sharing your changes from being an error-prone multi-step chore, to a simple button press.
Depending on your project, this can go even further. For the NiceGit website (hosted on GitHub Pages) sharing the text file for this blog post will also publishes it to the live site!
User Research Insights
NiceGit is currently, progressing through the Startmate Pre-Accelerator program. One of the great features of the program is promoting the importance of validating product ideas, in particular through user interviews. One of my mentors, Maisy Bennett, encouraged me to set a target of 100 user interviews. This felt incredibly ambitious, but prioritising this over all else has already shown huge value.
Thank you to everyone, friends, colleagues, Launch Club founders and new contacts, who have given 20-30 minutes of their time (or just over 90 in one particuarly fun case!) to share their experiences of collaborating on shared files. Our first dozen interviews has already created some amazing learnings:
- No-one other than a few power users is happy with their current Git experience
- There is huge variation among designers in their desire to work directly on project files. Some want their workflow to end with Figma design files, other see the ability to make changes to images, copy and design as revolutionary.
- Positioning the product is a really interesting challenge. Do we target designers, artists and writers, who may have the most to gain, but often the least familiarity with their options? Or do we target developers and power users, who might not personally use the NiceGit client, but would love to empower their colleagues.
- Interestingly, a lot of designers believe that programmers would do a better job of working with image assets than they would. Meanwhile programmers often don’t have much familiarity with image processing tools and are just winging it!
- Most developers interviewed have expressed an interest in simpler tools than they currently use, but supporting more features than the current NiceGit client. Should NiceGit support these use cases, or focus on being the most streamlined experience possible?
What’s Next?
Based on our research and your feedback, here’s what we’re focusing on for the next couple of weeks:
- Lots more user interviews. If you’d be interested in taking part please let me know.
- Creating wireframe designs based on the above. This will also define the feature set for our first Beta release.
- Continuing to explore ways to spread the word and get sign ups for the Beta. A major focus has been cold email outreach - you can read about our 24 Hour Validation Challenge to see how the results which have so far not been very scalable.
- Find some new placeholder portrait images =)