Squidblog

Okay, so it’s not quite as freakishly exciting as this.

But still, for those lensmasters of us out there with lots of lenses, or others who are stuck for ideas and resources for making their lenses even better, the new lensmaster dashboard is worth whooping over.

If you’re in a hurry and want to skip straight to the pullquote, here it is: The new dashboard puts lensmasters in charge of their own destiny. Our goal is to give you cleaner, quicker ways to see what’s working, what’s not, and take action. And, of course, to get a little OCD on organizing your lists (of hundreds of lenses!) exactly how you want.

If you want a little background on strategy and what to expect, take 2 minutes to read this overview.

If you’re the kind of person who likes bullet points:

• We’re introducing The Daily Digest page (or, a specific-to-you front page about the movers and shakers on your lens roster).
• And a My Lenses page, updated with labels (kinda like gmail). Now you can organize your lists of lenses however you want.
• If you hate change, never fear… you can still skip straight to the “All Lenses” list and see a sortable laundry list of all your lenses at once, just as on Dashboard 1.0.
• Oh, and we’ve flighted the dashboard according to how many lenses you have. If you have just 1 lens, you get one version of the dash. If you have 2, there’s another. 3-9 lenses, still another (introducing new tools). 10+ lenses, still another, powerlenser version.
• And, of course, if you’re a Giant Squid, you get an even specialerific version.

If you like written summaries: In conclusion… we’ll be rolling out the new dashboard really soon. We’ve integrated an awful lot of lensmaster requests into this version, watched how our lensmasters with 100 or 400 lenses were using (or, struggling with) their dashboards, as well as watched how newbies interacted with theirs. We also gave our Giant Squid Organizers, and 7 Giants, access to our staging server to playtest the new dash for us.

No, not everything you all wanted is there, and yes, we’ll be listening to feedback and ongoing suggestions as always. For now, I humbly submit to you a preview of the feedback we’ve gotten from our testers: “FANTASTIC! FABULOUS! FREAKIN’ AMAZING!”

Stay tuned.