A few days ago we opened up the new Bemba.com to a small group of people. It was exciting and of course this did not happen without problems and bugs on the site. The general impression is positive and that’s good! Let me share some of the feedback with you.

Sign up hurdles
A smooth sign up process is key for success. We found out that signing up on Bemba is not perfect yet. Although we read about UX design and Sign up pages (ie. The Art of the Sign Up Page), we made some mistakes. This is the top 3 of things our users did not like during sign up:

1. Unclear form field error text
The text was colored red, sure, but gave an unclear message. Default Rails error text is not good enough.

2. Case sensitive Captcha
People hate case sensitivity in Captcha. Don’t do it!

3. Confirmation email in Spam folder
You can’t really send out emails to users and making a 100% sure it ends up in the Inbox, but we should have made a bigger effort by following SPF guidelines and setup a SPF record.

Firefox extension love
We received a lot of positive feedback on our custom developed Firefox extension! After installation, you get a single button in your Firefox browser, right next to the Home button. It looks great in your browser, it’s Firefox 3 compatible and has auto-updating without hosting it on Mozilla Org servers. I must say, we’re proud!

Sharing links on Twitter, the easy way!
We did a nifty integration with the Twitter and our alpha testers responded with a big thumbs up! We used the Ultimate Open Source Ruby Library for the Twitter REST API, aka Twitter4r. Tweets are posted on Twitter instantly. Next step was to have our application recognized as ‘Bemba’ in tweets. Twitter developer Alex made this happen within 24 hours. Then, we created our very own URL shortener. The Bemba.com short URLs look cool in tweets! Check out these examples: Federico shares a link about 2 cute girls explaining SEO and Pierro Marie shares about Fast and effortless #photo galleries for your website or #blog.

Bemba features wishlist
Users are quite active on our Bemba Babl (a well designed discussion platform - Dutch only). These are the most wanted Bemba feature:

• Integration with Del.icio.us and Google Shared Items
• Tagging
• Search for publicly shared content

We’ll keep gathering feedback and tune the service, while preparing for our open Beta: support for Internet Explorer, Hyves integration and lots of Bemba.com improvements.

It’s a very exciting and challenging time for us. Keep you posted!