If you have logged in anytime recently (meaning last night and today), you’ve noticed this little box that popped up when you went to a film page:

(click to enlarge)

This box is part of a series of guides we’re placing around the site to help explain the different functionalities of different parts of our site. Because the features are so plentiful, we’ll be going around more and more and adding these tips to help you with your user experience.

To use this tip, click the numbers (or paragraph associated with that number) to see how each result will look. As you progress through the stages, the guides will show how the screen will look at every step. You’re allowed to go back and forth between steps, but you will only see these hints once. If you close the guide, you will not see it again.

We’d like to get some feedback on how helpful (if at all) this guide was to our users. Let us know on ideas you have to improve upon them or if you really like how it was setup and think you’d enjoying seeing others on other details of the site. As always, you can message Jason or I individually, email us or just post a comment to this blog post. We’ll be sure to listen fully to any tips or ideas you have and make sure we get the best ones implemented on our next guides.

-Mike

Here at IHM, we firmly understand that without you all, we’d be no where. We’re always trying to add on more features and tweak things to provide the best user experience for you all. Unfortunately, we’re not always able to see things from all perspectives. Often times, we’re only looking at features from what we think will be a good usage idea, but we’re unsure about what needs to be there. Often we’ll find ourselves messaging random users or users who we’ve created relationships with about things they’d like to see on the pages we’re designing.

While we like how this works, we want to have a more open line of communication for relaying of ideas for different features. We want users to take an interactive role in our site and help mold it into the perfect place for them.

If you’ve got ideas for our current features/pages or features/pages that you’d like to see, let us know. We’re not hard to talk to (most of the time) and we’ll listen to almost any suggestion. You can message us through IHM messages through our user pages (mine or jason’s) or you can email us.

We’re always looking for ideas to add to the IHM experience and it’s only with you that we’ll be able to make it better.

-Mike

As you’ve probably noticed when you logged in this morning, there was a big block of yellow replacing where your message center used to be located. Last night, we removed the message center from the account “dashboard” (frontpage). It’s now it’s own separate page (check it out).

We did this for a few different reasons. We are currently (as I’ve mentioned before) redesigning and changing the account dashboard. This page will have a lot more features that relate directly to you and get quite the speed increase when we’re done. We also eventually want to expand on the functionality of our messages. Moving it to a separate page was an easy way to accomplish both of those goals. Expect some more changes relating to the account dashboad soon.

-Mike

I meant to make this post last night, but got carried away into other things and didn’t. For those of you who don’t live in San Francisco (which means about almost every one of our users), we were mentioned in an AP article that was in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday about summer blockbusters. We were mentioned as a new upstart in movie social network category along with sites like Flixster and IMDb. We thought it was a pretty cool thing considering we like to read about ourselves (well I like pictures more, so I make Jason read articles to me).

Anyway, if you want to check it out, you can read it here: SF Gate Article

Also, I meant to mention this in my last post and completely forgot, but we made a change in the account frontpage (the page that shows your messages and friend’s activity). It’s now called your “Dashboard”. We’ll be updating this page to add a bunch more features to it and hopefully make it more useful to you as a user.

- Mike