WriterDuet versions 3-7
WriterDuet versions 3-7

A brief overview of each new version of WriterDuet that has been released during my time as Product Manager.

A brief overview of each new version of WriterDuet that has been released during my time as Product Manager.

Version 3

This was a massive technological undertaking that enabled a lot of future projects. While we already provided access to an infinite history of edits, this made it far more manageable. Writers could now create new documents from any point in their history to explore a new direction, had more advanced merging capabilities, and benefitted from dramatic performance improvements.

I was also still doing marketing, social media, and customer support during this period, so I created the content and managed the launch across all platforms.

Version 4

This was primarily a major design overhaul and was met with enormous satisfaction from users. I have learned most of what I know just by doing it over and over; V3&v4 were definitely informative as a pair in this way. Seeing the challenge of major technical updates with fewer updates to core experience, as opposed to the pleasant and cost-effective experience of providing a UI update that also rethought and simplified the friction points we had come to know intimately through customer support.

Version 5

While we did learn a lot from v3 and v4, we repeated ourselves a bit with v5. It was again a major update to the technology. We did away with any editing that wasn’t our own editing tech. This meant that cards for outlining, personal notes, and the ever-troublesome title page were now all synced and all-powerful. However, the added complexity of these updates resulted in some steps backward for the user experience.

We combined this work with the work we were doing for our client-funded

Bookwriting Studio⁠

. This meant that we incorporated project-grouped documents, variable-width fonts, and images into the broad release.

Version 6

Like version 4, this one learned from the risks we took in version 5 and either transformed them into successes, or destroyed them. As a creative and professional app, modularity and flexibility have always been important to us. We maximized our modularity in v5, and in v6 we nailed down how to provide the best initial experience and the best path to these sorts of advanced features and flows.

Version 7

Further UX improvements and dramatic performance improvements. The smoothness with which this major change to the backend tech took place was a testament to how much we had nailed down our processes for planning, launch, support, and QA.

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