Headway - Easiest way to keep your customers in the loop

@joshuapinter Thanks man! Every time you publish a new changelog the widget gets updated, and the badge becomes red showing that there's something new under there, is this what you're looking for? If not can you elaborate a bit?

@oskar Yeah, I guess that's decent enough. I was looking for something a bit more obvious - most of our users wouldn't notice (or care to notice) that badge. Intercom does a preview thing from the right side that is impossible to be ignored. It would be great to setup like a open-on-new-item option for the widget so if a user has a change that they haven't seen it would open up the widget on first landing. Then it could be ignored but and just leave the badge until it was actually viewed or something.

@joshuapinter Hmm, interesting, while I do like the idea, I'm wondering if that wouldn't be too obtrusive – aren't you getting angry messages from your users about that Intercom sidebar popping up? Just curious. What we're planning is this thing we're calling Progressive Eyecatcher, which would animate the badge and progressively make the animation more eyecatching, all the way until it gets ... a bit too annoying not to click on it and read what it has to say.

@oskar I agree with you that if it can get annoying. We haven't got any complaints yet with the Intercom approach but I imagine users generally like seeing new features being released. However, I like your "Progressive Eyecatcher" approach. That would solve the problem of it being missed.

@niteshmanav 🍺❤️

@igcorreia Early on we've decided not to have sub-accounts as from our experiences this makes thing super difficult to maintain. We might re-visit this idea if there's demand for this. So far, three people asked for this – not that much considering how many people signed up for Headway.

@yoavanaki Thanks, I love it too! We haven't tested any other variations, there was a very clear and specific vision of how it should work (the widget presentation), and this was the best way to present it + having a tagline and CTA on the left. I've spent quite some time getting the scrolling presentation to work – the main issue I wanted to work out is not to "steal" or alter the native scrolling inertia in any way, also even though the screen doesn't move, to show where the user is when they scroll. I'm quite happy with the results. I think this can be opensourced.

@conarro was your system time correct there? That time difference calculation is made in the browser, we could probably move it to the backend not to run into issues like this one. How is your experience so far, is headway already running on your website?

@majkelcc yeah, my system time was correct. We haven't gone live with it, but I have played with it locally. My initial thoughts: Marking items as read: It'd be nice if the items were marked as read just by clicking the notification badge (to avoid having to individually click each item even if there is no additional content to see by doing so) Show full unread notification count (independent of limit in popup) Right now if I have 5 unread but the settings limit to 3, the badge shows 3. It might make sense to show 5 in the badge, 3 in the list, and then a "see all" link underneath to link to the full page. Customize page title / logo It'd be nice to be able to change the page title (we probably wouldn't call it a 'changelog'). Also adding a custom logo would be nice to improve the branding. Customize 'read the whole scoop' button So it better matches our branding/language. Link to full changelog page in popup (maybe the popup title?) It'd be nice to link to the full changelog page since people otherwise won't know it exists. Link(s) to external resources It'd be nice to be able to link to an external resource (help doc, blog announcement) for bigger changes. We currently have a feed pulled in from our blog for big feature releases. If headway had a "Title URL" or "External URL" field for a changelog item, we could just link to the announcement straight from the headway changelog and ditch our custom thing. Without this, we could add the link in the changelog description but that's not as ideal (requires a click on the badge, click on the item, click on the link inside item description). -- Extras RSS Any plans to allow users to subscribe to a changelog via RSS? That'd be very nice. Github integration Agree that Github integration would be useful. To me, associating a changelog with one or more GH projects would be nice. Then you could pull in recent pull requests as suggestions for what to include in a changelog item. API In lieu of a formal Github integration, a proper API would allow people to build their own integrations. I saw mention of "API" on the help docs but there was no actual content (yet?). I also came across this little UI bug in your changelog: https://www.evernote.com/l/ACfSm... Really like the simplicity of the product. Hope this helps, let me know if you have questions!

@conarro many good ideas, I think most of them will end up in our roadmap, so thanks! As for the github integration I was thinking about the same - extracting suggestions from commit messages/pull requests. Stay tuned to our changelog :)

@andreasduess Thanks for the heads-up. We'll look into that.