For the past 12 months I've been project managing a complete overhaul of the DemocracyInAction.org tools. My role has been to define the 10,000 ft of what the changes are and to clear the lane of obstacles so that the team can deliver. Now that we are at release 1.0 of the new tools I want to share a lesson that I seem to keep learning: Communicate often and early about change.

People hate change. Loathe it. The DIA tools had some really bad user interfaces. Part of our job was to create a better user experience. The problem is that no matter how quirky the old UI was, users adapted to it. Part of the solution has been to communicate those changes to the clients. No matter how much better the new hotness is going to be, the end users need to be kept in the loop. You can read more about this at the DIA blog.

In addition to the blog postings, we created a public-beta email list. Those intrepid enough to sign up received almost daily updates on the progress we were making such as recent fixes and a list of the next items we were tackling. This helped keep our beta testers more in the loop and cut down on redundant bug submissions. Now that we are out of the warm, safe confines, of the public beta, I am not sure if we will keep up this daily update of fixes and changes. I'm not sure, mainly, because I'm tired. Also, I want to find out how helpful this has been. Do folks want to keep getting these updates? We also post them online here. Perhaps just make them RSS-able?