We are excited to announce the release of our Permanent.org Product Roadmap – an outline of our development plans to make Permanent.org a more robust and easy to use platform for anyone to preserve their digital legacy.
The Permanent.org Product Roadmap is published in our GitHub repository. The roadmap sketches out an estimated timeline for releasing new features and major updates to the Permanent.org application. We created this Product Roadmap to keep our members better informed about what we’re working on and build excitement around upcoming improvements and features. The Experience Team and Engineering Team collaborated on writing the roadmap so that it reflects major user experience improvements, members’ feedback and experiences, and the design and engineering time it will take to create these features and improvements. Releases noted on the product roadmap are estimates and may change based on continued member feedback and new opportunities.
Even though we just recently published the product roadmap, many of these new features that will help you on your journey to preserve your digital legacy are already in progress. Our new Legacy Planning feature will allow you to designate what you want to happen to your Permanent account and your Permanent archives when you are gone. Last quarter, we created designs and a working prototype to better understand how users will navigate the new features and options we’ve provided. We will be collecting feedback about these designs from our members this quarter, as well as beginning to build the basic structure for the feature in our database. (Estimated release: late 2022/early 2023)
Metadata is a vital part of digital preservation, and adding metadata on Permanent will soon be easier and better adhere to archival best practices with our new bulk editing feature and Dublin Core metadata fields. We have created designs for both of these improvements and will begin building them in the Permanent system in the upcoming months. (Estimated release: 2022)
We’ve also planned improvements to existing features such as the upload status bar and the search functionality to make it easier for you to build, collaborate on, and share your Permanent archives. To redesign the upload status bar, our UX designer Nathalie Rayter conducted interviews with some of our members to identify pain points in the uploading process on Permanent. She then created a new design for the upload status bar that provides additional information about a file’s progress. (Estimated release: 2023)
We strive to create a trusted platform that gives our members complete control over their digital legacy, so we take your feedback and experience into consideration in every step of the product development process. When we created the Product Roadmap, we prioritized features and improvements that our members have been asking for. We will also be using the feedback we gather from our members about Legacy Planning for Permanent.org accounts and archives to refine our designs before we build them.
If you would like to share your feedback or experience with us, you can email us or join our User Testing Community to participate in future feature testing opportunities. We look forward to hearing from you about these exciting new features and about how we can continue to improve Permanent.
