Coming changes to Connect's development team
With the recent release of Connect 2.4, the Connect team is beginning a phase of more regular releases, in a hopefully dependable rhythm that we can continue to rely on. The Connect team has grown somewhat as Connect has grown.
The Connect team is reorganizing slightly to improve our ability to create a quality experience for the folks who use Connect. The biggest change, and one I'm sure many of you will be excited to hear, is that we are creating a dedicated User Experience (UX) team. In the past, we've had resources devoted to UX, but now we're really focusing hard on it, staffing an entire group within Connect with development, PM and test resources and giving that team full control of the user interface and user experience.
With a dedicated UX team devoted to just the web interface, we're also changing the rest of the team's structure somewhat- both to reflect the growth of the team and to be more effective in general. For example- I'm going to continue being the primary Feedback developer- and many will be very happy to hear that we've added a new SDE to the feedback team (yay!), but we'll have less direct impact on the user interface and more on the "backend". The same restructuring is occuring throughout the team, with the folks who have worked on the features used in Connect continuing to work on those features, but instead of being directly responsible for the UX and UI, the previously mentioned team will be coordinating these efforts.
In the end we believe this will have a huge impact on our ability to create a consistent, usable experience and continuously improve the Connect user interface. We've talked about something like this for quite some time but we kept coming back to the fact that we just weren't large enough a team for such a structure to work. While we haven't grown by orders of magnitude or anything, we have grown somewhat- and the application is much more mature than it was when the idea was first floated, which enables us to take what we all think is a great step for Connect and our customers.
