As Halloween approaches, we've hit a lovely milestone in our work to redesign and modernize EntryThingy in order to better serve your needs. We've chatted with over 100 galleries and given them walk-through tours of the new interface. (If you're reading this and you're one of those 100 galleries, thank you for your time and support!)
One of the most common questions we get as we're walking folks through our changes is, why?
After so many years of the same interface, why are you changing things now?
This blog post aims to answer that question, as well as give you some of our guiding principles for how we're approaching this work with care and consideration.
We're going through this work stream with four main principles in mind that act as lodestars for guiding our decision, both at the big picture level and for details as minute as where to put the reschedule email button.
- Fix the broken windows.
We'll speak bluntly here. We have received hundreds, if not thousands, of emails from gallerists and artists alike over the past two years about a subset of issues that are overwhelmingly necessary to fix. These are not exciting or sexy things to discuss. We're talking about improving the reset password flow, making downloads faster, improving mobile support, and so on. This kind of work rarely gets excitement. But we also know that you aren't looking for excitement. You're looking for reliability and stability so you can focus on the more urgent work you have at hand.
- An interface that works for everyone.
Through extensive interviews and beta tests, we pinpointed a lot of desire paths that don't currently exist in the main EntryThingy interface. Bulk updating statuses of entries, being able to quickly search and collate artists, and so on. We want to turn these tasks from chores that you dread having to do as part of every call into a pleasant afterthought.
- Help you reach more artists.
We could build the nicest and fastest tooling in the world, and it wouldn't make a difference if the artists who want to apply for your calls for entry drop out of the process or find it too difficult to complete. We spent a lot of time and care in thinking about ways to make it smoother for your customers and your artists to submit their work, including automatic image tooling, better authentication mechanisms, and faster and more ergonomic searching of open calls.
- Don't screw it up.
We do not take lightly the fact that many of you have relied on EntryThingy for over a decade to help run your gallery. Speaking personally, one of the emotional moments for me during this previous round of beta testing is when multiple galleries told me that without EntryThingy, they likely would have had to close permanently during COVID.
We know change can be scary and difficult, and with every step of this work we're doing, we're being as careful and considerate as we can to set you and your gallery up for success, not just for the next year, but for the next decade. Even if you haven't noticed it yet, we've already built and shipped a lot of things in this thing. (For instance, the database powering your entries is now three or four times faster than it has historically been, as well as more secure.)
If you ever have questions about any of this, you can talk to us as a team at hello@entrythingy.com.