For the last few weeks we’ve been busy growing the team and making some enhancements to blist. I’ll use this post to provide a quick update.

Earlier this week Mark joined the team as director of user experience. Until now we had relied on a few visual and interaction design consultants to help put a face on blist and they’ve done a great job. One of our goals is to democratize working with data in large part through breakthrough innovations in usability. It’s precarious to indefinitely rely on consultants for a function that we consider a core competency and key differentiator. From day one we’d wanted this critical function in house and we’re thrilled to have Mark aboard. It’s ironic, because we tried to hire Mark a year ago but I couldn’t articulate the vision well enough at that time to pique his interest. Throughout the year we’ve kept in casual contact and were finally able to bring him in. Mark holds a masters degree in design interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelors in environmental design and architecture from the University of Colorado. I’m thrilled to have him on the team and hope you’ll join me in welcoming him to the team.

Over the last three or four weeks we’ve slowed new feature development in order to focus on improving stability, boosting performance, polishing existing features and making the first use experience of the application more enjoyable and positive. We’re pretty happy with the progress to date on all four of these fronts, but we’ll continue to focus in these areas for another week or two.

For the first use experience, we’ve been working on providing more guidance to get new users up and running quickly. For example, we’ve created a video on creating your first blist, written a getting started topic guide and added a “Getting Started” section to the blist dashboard, which is now the home page when blist starts.

These are really fun times at blist. The team is growing via the addition of a handful of remarkable people. The application continues to evolve. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see the interesting and productive ways in which people are using blist.