The ningo.me platform went online one year ago today. It is time for one look back and one ahead. And it is time to celebrate a happy birthday.
The first glaring enlightenment of this first year was the realization that our first concept of the ningo.me platform was not so much a messaging or email forwarding service, but a bank. What went live one year ago was in essence the basic framework of a bank – with micro- and macro-payment transactions, audit trails, and all kinds of scary liabilities. We thank the attorney.
During this year, ningo.me changed from being optimized mainly for a single man’s brain (mine) to being optimized for a truly global audience. I was a heavy user of the service myself from day one.
As I used the interface and the features all the time, I started loving everything that was already implemented by the effect of mere exposure. At the same time, every time I used it, I came up with yet another great feature that could be added. The result was a lot of busy work for a platform that was optimized for one single user – me!
As described before, it was shallow and serious usability testing that brought about the big turn-around. We went from incomprehensible insider-speak to globally understandable straight talk – and continue to work on it as we get real user feedback by now.
Finally, for this year, we are learning the hard lessons of selling an innovation.
The ball is rolling now, and the users start rolling in. We start observing what is easily understood and what is not. We engage in personal conversations with the users. We try to understand them on an individual level and help them to get started.
I look forward to your feedback, and am very excited about the evolving service that will be the roaring ningo.me. We will be celebrating a happy birthday today!