MushMate's Guide described the product, section after section. A partner who wants to offer MushMate to their mushers isn't looking for a section: they want to know what to do on Monday morning. So the Guide now opens on "I am…", and each audience has its own guide, written step by step.
What changes for you
- One entry per audience. On
/en/guide, an "I am…" card leads to/en/guide/for/partner: what MushMate offers, "Your first week", the pages of the guide, the frequently asked questions. The rest of the Guide, "All topics", is still there, below. - Step-by-step pages. Every gesture has the same shape: what you will do, what you need, the numbered steps, what you should see, what others see, what it does not do, if something goes wrong, going further. The first guide has four: giving a code to your mushers, reading your private page, what your mushers see, and — on the musher side — using a code.
- Screenshots taken on today's app, redone with a command rather than pasted once and for all. Redoing them showed that the six images of the plan page showed a menu that no longer exists: they are redone.
- A "Help" link on the "Partner code" card in Settings, leading to the right page.
What others see — and what the guide never shows
- The partner guide is public: a musher can read it. They find what the partner receives — a number of activations, month by month — and what they never receive: a name, a kennel, an address.
- The screenshots come from a local demo database: no real musher, no real kennel appears in them. "Acme Sled Gear" and "Husky Trail" are demo names.
What it does not do
- The musher's guide isn't finished. The breeder's is written (from the litter's page to the puppy's logbook handed over to its buyer, with the buyer's page), and so is the club's (founding, inviting, the group outing, the leaderboard, the trails); the musher's first four pages are written, the others follow. An "I am…" card only appears when its guide is fully written: better an audience with no card than a card that promises.
- The Guide doesn't create your code. A partner code is opened by the MushMate team with you; the guide says how to ask for it, not how to give it to yourself.
- It describes the phone's new app, not the old one. As long as it remains a preview (Settings › Preview: new app), the phone pages say so at the top.
- No automatic reminder yet checks that every page is up to date: that is the next step, and it isn't done.
Three choices made against the obvious
An audience only gets its card once its guide is ready. We could have shown all four on day one, with "soon" on the missing ones. An empty card makes people click for nothing; better that it doesn't exist.
Screenshots are redone, not touched up. A hand-edited screenshot ages without anything saying so; a screenshot redone with a command is compared with the previous one, and the command names the pages to review when the screen changed.
A partner only sees figures through a link, never through an account. We could have opened a space with a password. We kept a private, regenerable link, because that is what the partner can keep without installing anything — and because the fewer accounts we hold, the fewer names there are to protect.