Happy New Year - University District Release

January 22, 2013

By Adam Phillabaum, @adamb0mb

We spent the end of 2012 figuring out some of the bigger picture things we wanted to get done in 2013… and we've wasted no time in getting started on them.

To explain where we currently are, I'm going to use a little metaphor: When you go on a roadtrip, you have to pack the car before you hit the road. This is a large item on the to-do list and necessary for the rest of the trip to be successful. Your friends might call and ask, "How far have you made it bro?" and you may respond "I'm still in the garage." So even though you've made a ton of progress in preparing for your trip, someone on the outside may not see the work you've done. Sometimes software development is the same way — we've made a lot of good progress, even though we're still in the garage.

Here's what we've done so far:

Do You Know What You're Worth?

Data Tools

We spent a large part of our time this release building tools for us to manage our internal data resources. I know, it sounds boring but the excitment on our team is actually pretty high. We have years of unprocessed data that we've never tapped into, because we lacked the proper tools to do so. We now have the tools to allow us to start extracting the first bits of usable information from this data.

In the next release, the fruits of these tools be manifested in some great new features.

Job Descriptions

If you've ever used our salary reports for businesses, you may know about our "tasks." These are descriptions of the individual responsibilities of a job. If you were to combine all of the tasks, you'd have something very close to the "job description" for that job. We've finally exposed these tasks on the Research Center. We're going to continue to improve these tasks throughout the year.

New Survey Start

We like to toy around with new designs for the module that takes people to our survey from our Research Center pages to improve the experience and optimize conversion. Here is the latest:

That's it for this release; look for more exciting changes in a few weeks. Hope you're having a good year so far!