January 2009

Hurray, Dojo Learning is growing! That means we are working towards building a better company that offers improved services and tools.

The upgrade this weekend means several behind-the-scenes improvements that make Dojo a more reliable service than ever. Specifically, these include:

•	Hardware virtualization, which means a smooth path for future growth as well as protection from common hardware failures.
•	A completely revamped backup system that is much more reliable than the old one.
•	Improvements to our outbound email setup, ensuring messages get through to you and your learners.
•	Minor bug fixes that resolve an issue some customers have reported with our custom themes.

These changes have laid out a strong foundation for future growth of Dojo Learning as well as the basic building blocks for several upcoming new features. We are seeing more activity and more interest in Dojo Learning which is good news for us and you, our customer. We want to grow our company as naturally as we can, and it's happening.

We are also feverishly working on changes to our services based on direct feedback. We know that our customers know what they want and we can't wait to start showing off the many big changes we have coming this year.

Thank you and your learners for helping us grow.

Lux & Les, co-founders of Dojo Learning

Just letting everyone know that we will be doing some site maintenance this coming Saturday, January 17th starting around 11:00 A.M. Central Standard Time (CST). The site will still be accessible throughout the maintenance, but certain features will be disabled for up to 24 hours while we wait for some DNS changes to propagate across the internet. Those features include:

• New member and learner sign-ups
  
• Creating and editing lessons
• Chatting and posting to lesson lounges
• Notes, journal entries and journal comments

This is a one-time change that will help ensure we can continue to scale the Dojo Learning platform to meet our site growth needs for some time to come. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us.

This is part five of a series of posts about how we built Dojo Learning (part one, two, three and four).

Plan each feature on paper and think it through first

Like I mentioned in the last post, wireframes are a great way to visualize and plan new features out. Each screen of what you're building should be wireframed as best as possible to see how it will flow and to spot flaws in your idea.

This also puts the user first, since you're designing around their experience of your software. A natural extension of this aspect of wireframes is usability testing. You can usability test with just wireframes, before you've written any new code.

We also wireframe mostly on paper. I love tools like OmniGraffle for presenting something professional to a customer, but computer interfaces have yet to even get close to paper and pen in terms of just getting your idea out, and trying multiple iterations and alternatives quickly.

For a good example of how to design a user interface with wireframes, see this paper from 37signals.

Paper is also great because you can write user stories, lists, asides and anything else that helps you get a better idea of what you need to build and who you're building it for.

We also try to get our database schema down at this stage too, since that helps us think about other potential uses for the same data down the road. I find this helps ensure we're not being too limited in our data model, which might hinder future feature additions.

So for us, step one is always designing from the end user's perspective and making sure that comes first. Step two is making sure we've thought of everything from a data and implementation standpoint. From there, the code becomes a matter of connecting the dots.

If you liked this post, make sure you subscribe to our blog by RSS or email so you catch the rest of this series of posts.