Nexus – Next Round of Prioritization

The next build of nexus starts today as our agile project continues. Let us know what stuff you think is most important for this release, as part of our prioritization.

Already Scheduled Work

We already know that we’re going to focus on a couple items for this release of nexus. These items represent, as Roger put it in recent comments, areas of highest risk. Our interpretation – risk is the risk that the site won’t gain critical mass and become the valuable tool that it can be.

• Searching Articles. This is one of the previously identified use cases – also previously targeted for the second release.
• Pagination of Articles. While not a requirement per se, we are introducing this refactoring of the design as the most significant usability concern that has arisen. There are currently only 18 articles on nexus – and when you view an unfiltered list of the articles, you see all 18. When this list is 50 or 100 items strong – which should be this week – pagination will have a significant impact on usability and adoption. So this is on the top of our list for refactoring.

As an interesting aside – these are both technically challenging activities too – so they also represent two of the higher technical risks.

Other Possibilities

Here’s a quick list of other items, not in priority order, that we may work on this week. We will look at prioritization of them as early as later today – and as late as the completion of pagination and a first version of search.

• Broadcasting an Article – notifying someone who isn’t a registered nexus user about an article.
• Creating a Mashup – allowing users to create collections of articles that can be used for organizing ideas that span articles.
• Suggestion of Articles – provide article suggestions based upon the scores that you and others have given to articles on the site.
• Allowing article deletion/moderation – give moderators the ability to suppress articles that don’t contribute to the community.
• Allowing review suppression – give registered users the ability to suppress reviews that detract from the experience for people.
• Present a feedback form / suggestion box – allow users to make suggestions about how to improve the site.
• Enforce article uniqueness by URL – prevent duplicate submissions.
• Create an about-page for nexus – explaining the purpose of the site beyond the snippet in the sidebar.
• Create help documents – explaining how to accomplish goals with nexus.
• Create a subscription service – allow people to subscribe to notifications when articles are submitted to nexus.
• Allow users to edit their info – change password, email address, other data.
• Refactor the presentation of articles – time-box 2 hours for a redesign / treatment of presentation.

Your Suggestions

And any suggestions that y’all want to make at this time. Maybe some of the ideas above either inspired you to suggest new ideas. Maybe you have thoughts about the approach to implementing any of the above. Please share them in the discussion on this article. If you feel strongly about any of the above – either for inclusion or exclusion (or delay) – please share that input in the discussion below. And remember, you can subscribe to the comments for individual articles – so do that if you want to track this discussion as it unfolds. We’ll take all of the inputs into account when prioritizing these efforts for the current release.