Polls? Yes. One of the harder parts about being a sole designer at a startup is that you have try really hard to adhere to what your core product is, and it’s easy to lose focus on that because of all the cool features your team thinks of. The social design explosion is a great article about determining your feature set, and we’re looking at what makes sense and what doesn’t for our users. We wanted to introduce polls because they are adding an extremely great way for users to essentially help shape the curriculum here and ultimately be a place where cooks can learn what they want. And what’s our core mission? Making you a better cook.

So voting for new content is currently where it’s at here at ChefSteps. Make sure you head over and vote on your favorite new thing that our kick-ass kitchen crew will work on. We’re probably going to open up some other social features coming up soon, but don’t look for the deluge of social features to encroach on the great content that we’re putting out.

Last week I changed up the default avatar on everyone’s profile with something pretty generic, but also lets you know that it should be an avatar. There’s a lot of gray boxes out there! Make sure you update your avatar and bio by clicking on the profile link on the navigation bar at the top right. It’ll help you stick out of the crowd.

Last thing for all you designers out there working on digital products: I’ve been working on an email engagement plan to get more awareness on all things we’re working on at ChefSteps. A couple of awesome things that have made my life easier are mailmatic and pre-mailer (comes packaged with mailmatic). It allows me to design and code emails using SASS and HAML and automatically converts them to HTML-style email (like 1990’s code). Pretty awesome. I really want to make the first 30 days of a user’s experience at ChefSteps really amazing (and of course, after that, too), and an email engagement plan is part of that. If you have suggestions on how to make your experience better, please let me know.

That’s it for now. On to 43!