Lovely Charts

So, besides architecting Lovely Charts 2.0, I have this biiiiiiiig list of things I want/need to work on: new features to add, existing stuff to improve or change… Thanks to your incredible feedback, I’ve been able over the last weeks/months to gain a pretty good understanding of what was most desired or criticized; but now, how do I take actions on this and concretely decide on what to work on next?

Well, I did two things last week to help me out with this prioritization process:

• Classical “Risk/Reward” evaluations: looking at the entire feature/enhancement requests list, A.) what would be the reward(s) if I added/improved feature XYZ? Would it improve the user experience, global quality, the free > premium conversion rate, …? Then, B.) what are the assoicated risks? Is it highly complex or is it easy to do? Does it have “strings attached” in terms of infrastructure costs or requirements, how heavily could it impact the existing code base, etc?
• Spiking. A spike is a technique often used in Agile processes when a story can’t be properly estimated because of its technical complexity or novelty. It’s about exploring options, prototyping, builidng POCs, (in-)validating ideas, in short doing what’s necessary in order to figure out appropriate solutions to complex and/or little-known problems, and consequently make informed decisions.

Spiking in particular, has been of tremendous value, as it really helped prioritizing features and assessing attached risks based on a early, thorough understanding of the issues at hand, I can’t recommend strongly enough you give it a try if you’ve never done it.

What have I spiked this week? Well, I notably investigated SVG export, and realized it wasn’t going to be difficult to implement per se but that it would nevertheless require some serious testing to get it right across the entire library set and accompanying options, which lead me to give a high Risk threshold to this feature.
But I also started seriously considering options for Lovely Charts’ most desired feature of all times: Importing custom symbols (images, vector flash files…), and definitely established the architecture was flexible enough to accomodate it with very minimal effort! The picture above is a screenshot of my spike’s result showing an image of Lovely Charts’ home page being imported and used in a diagram.

Realizing this definitely allowed me to reduce the risk level I had previously perceived as attached to this, so given the fact that this feature has maximal reward value, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to decide to implement it now, and even announce it!
So that’s what’s coming up next: the ability to upload your own symbols and thereby extend the library and tune it to your specific needs.
That being said, even if my spike validated the fact that it was feasible at a reasonable cost, it’s still a significant piece of work, so you won’t see it immediately, but I believe you can reasonably expect it (ie, a beta version) by the end of the month!