We put our heart and soul into the new Impactstory and have been on pins and needles to hear what you think.  Well it’s been a week and the verdict is in — we’re hearing that the new version is awesome, fantastic, and truly excellent, a home run and must-have–an academic profile that’s exciting and relevant.

And so much more. So much more, in fact, that we wanted to a little break from the frenzied responding, bugfixing, and feature-launching we’ve been doing this week and summarize a bit of what we’ve heard.

What do you like?

A lot of users have appreciated that it now takes seconds and is super easy to set up a profile that’s blazing fast and smooth to use: it’s instant insights about your research.

Unlike speed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder–but our beholders seem delightfully agreed that our new look is great, great, great.  Whether users are calling it fresh or beautifully crafted, or sleek or smooth or snazzy, everyone seems to agree that the new version looks awesome, it looks pretty damn awesome. And we are pretty thrilled to hear that.

They’re enjoying that it’s got some fun 🙂 And, we’re not surprised to hear that people like the new price point of Free, making it easier to recommend to others.  

What’s it good for?

Impactstory helps researchers find impacts of their work beyond just citations. People have found mentions they didn’t know about on Wikipedia, discussion in cool blog posts, and reviews on Faculty of 1000. And not just numbers, but impact across the globe. Not just numbers but connecting with people: for instance user Peter van Heusden tweeted, “Using @Impactstory I discovered someone who is consistently promoting work I’m involved in, but who I had no idea existed!”

All this amounts to more than just a lovely ego boost (although it’s that too!). People are telling us that it’s motivating them to adopt more Open Science practices like uploading research slides to a proper repository, getting an ORCID, adding works to their ORCID profile, and celebrating their non-paper publications.

How are you using it?

People are already sending their Impactstory profiles to their funders, and their funders are loving them.  Researchers have added their new profile to their CV, and are planning on using Impactstory data to define innovative ‘pathway to impact’ for UK grants and in tenure and promotion packets.

Folks are including it in workshops.  And even better — building things with our open data! Check out the ferret.io plugin, it rolled out impactstory support this week and it’s really cool 🙂

What have we been doing?

We’ve made a bunch of changes this week in response to your feedback:

• imports all your publications, not just DOIs.  Everything on your ORCID profile now displays in your Impactstory profile, and we’re working on getting more openness and altmetrics data
• twitter integration
  • connecting twitter updates your profile pic so you don’t have to fight with gravatar
  • you don’t have to enter email manually–even faster signup
  • we’ll be using your twitter feed for achievements in the future
• there’s a new Open Sesame achievement
• we changed the scores at the top of the profile beside your picture; they are now counts of your achievements
• the achievements and the import process are better documented
• we rolled out dozens of smaller features, usability enhancements, and bugfixes.

What’s next?

We’re on our way to the FORCE16 conference this week.  We’ll be rolling the feedback from the conference along with your continued feedback into continued improvement to the app.

And you?  Join in with everyone showing off their profile, spread the word (this is how we will grow), and if you don’t have a profile, get one, and tell us what you think!

Finally, thanks.

Finally, we’d like to thank the hundreds of passionate people who have helped us with money and with moral support along the way, from our early days till now. It’s safe to say the new Impactstory is a big hit.  It’s our hit, together.