Making Bashfully less opinionated as we understand impact of complexity
This is part of a series about my side project Bashfully, which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach.
This came from engaging with a potential user on Twitter that really bought this use case out as a good hook. As a follow up to that we also got four new users organically. Finding our product/market fit has been very heavily influenced by a) how we show the complexity of the product and b) how opinionated we make the process of using it.
Succeeding in this short term goal then opens up a path to some more long term aims, which require a larger and more connected user base. So, this wasn't chosen in isolation as a quick fix. It's also about sustainability and thinking about the long term growth.
We also added in options around the most opinionated features like the abstract and eras. Then made them optional to meet the short term goal. This decision was aided by the small spike in organic sign-ups that didn’t understand and/or make full use of feature.
This iteration on the core feature has been key to progress. Not just incrementally adding new features, but going back and improving the features already out there.It has delayed some more eye catching features that we'd like to introduce. But unless the foundations are solid no one would be using them!
This has allowed us to make Bashfully less opinionated as we understand impact of complexity. It has also made it easier to add features without overloading that setup process.
In parallel to those larger changes we have been tweaking things like the homepage (pictured left). Bringing up more information "above the fold". We have also made it easier to get to your own profile. Sometimes too much thinking about onboarding can make things harder for your users!
We have also reduced the number of action menus. Initially it had made sense to have one in the profile header, but it's more standard to have a profile menu in the top right. So we have added "Manage Profile" alongside sign in/sign out. Along with a bit more personalisation with the profile picture appearing here.
We have also reduced the static pages on the site, previously we had one explaining the LinkedIn profile import and another that discussed the integrations at a higher level. This is now a single page, which is more focused around the desired outcome - aligning our short term goal to the users'.
One of the benefits of tidying up as you go along, is that it not only makes changes easier to make but it makes the decisions about changes easier as well. The impact is easier to reason about and then test.
Branching out import options was always long term goal, and mentioned as a future direction in the last Bashfully blog post. Changes to the LinkedIn PDF export format gave us extra impetus to do it. Looks like the only reason behind change was to disrupt services like bashfully as the files were now 4 times bigger with pretty much same content! This is a big risk of tying the import too much to one service.
We also want to be open. So our export feature is explicitly shareable and machine readable. Using the JSON resume format, which we are also looking at for our API. I am actually really pleased that we added this before we needed to use an machine readable import. We aren't just paying lip service to "openness"because it benefits us. We are only custodians of the data, why shouldn't the users have full control and portability?
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| Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash |
New short term goal
One of the bigger things to happen to the project in the past month is creating a new short term goal to“make it as easy as possible to get resume info in and a PDF out”.
This came from engaging with a potential user on Twitter that really bought this use case out as a good hook. As a follow up to that we also got four new users organically. Finding our product/market fit has been very heavily influenced by a) how we show the complexity of the product and b) how opinionated we make the process of using it.
Succeeding in this short term goal then opens up a path to some more long term aims, which require a larger and more connected user base. So, this wasn't chosen in isolation as a quick fix. It's also about sustainability and thinking about the long term growth.
Complexity vs opinionated software
Reflecting back over the past four months of changes, and feedback, is that we are on a journey balancing a trade-off in complexity vs opinionated software. We started off with our initial launch being very opinionated. This was expressed in our three step wizard in the MVP launch, which we replaced and then gradually increased functionality with feedback. We wanted to make sure that we were being useful at start vs a sparse empty state and users getting lost. We hope that the empty state now makes it very easy to see what to do next, and the impact of not doing an action to "complete" the profile.We also added in options around the most opinionated features like the abstract and eras. Then made them optional to meet the short term goal. This decision was aided by the small spike in organic sign-ups that didn’t understand and/or make full use of feature.
This iteration on the core feature has been key to progress. Not just incrementally adding new features, but going back and improving the features already out there.It has delayed some more eye catching features that we'd like to introduce. But unless the foundations are solid no one would be using them!
This has allowed us to make Bashfully less opinionated as we understand impact of complexity. It has also made it easier to add features without overloading that setup process.
Smaller tweaks
We have also reduced the number of action menus. Initially it had made sense to have one in the profile header, but it's more standard to have a profile menu in the top right. So we have added "Manage Profile" alongside sign in/sign out. Along with a bit more personalisation with the profile picture appearing here.
We have also reduced the static pages on the site, previously we had one explaining the LinkedIn profile import and another that discussed the integrations at a higher level. This is now a single page, which is more focused around the desired outcome - aligning our short term goal to the users'.
One of the benefits of tidying up as you go along, is that it not only makes changes easier to make but it makes the decisions about changes easier as well. The impact is easier to reason about and then test.
Import options
Branching out import options was always long term goal, and mentioned as a future direction in the last Bashfully blog post. Changes to the LinkedIn PDF export format gave us extra impetus to do it. Looks like the only reason behind change was to disrupt services like bashfully as the files were now 4 times bigger with pretty much same content! This is a big risk of tying the import too much to one service.
We also want to be open. So our export feature is explicitly shareable and machine readable. Using the JSON resume format, which we are also looking at for our API. I am actually really pleased that we added this before we needed to use an machine readable import. We aren't just paying lip service to "openness"because it benefits us. We are only custodians of the data, why shouldn't the users have full control and portability?
Further reading
The blog posts that document the MVP process at bashfully so far.
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