Week 913

Matt Kirkland

Last Friday in January already! It's been a fairly busy week, with a few landmarks.

Over in the merch world, our clients had a surprise big sale - one of the newer bands on the platform (Mitski!) relaunched her merch store with us. It's always fun both to see a sales spike, to see how the platform handles the traffic, and just also cool to see a band I personally listen to sell their merch. That's a great feeling both to see our work perform well, but also be part of the supporting infrastructure that lets artists make a living.

We also launched that bundle of changes to the Institute today; this is a set of UI updates that make the app more accessible, some UX changes that make user account tools much easier to find, and a whole new 'Career Compass' visualization that's been literally more than a year in the works.

The 'Compass' is a key model for this platform. It's all about professional development, allowing users to take a variety of training materials, get tested, and see a map of their 'skills' get filled in. But the UI around this was always a little hidden, and this new map is a big improvement. It takes inspiration from video game skill trees and trivial pursuit pies!

What else? The Neumz team is still working on some neat features coming soon. We're moving forward with a lot of improvements to the Knock interface, including prototypes for some social challenge functions. Codename Robert is still moving along, both refining stuff we've found in the pilot and preparing for a handover. Some other small things for others! The long tail remains long.