Author: Floor Drees

As we were selected for the Alpha Program of the fourth annual edition of the Web Summit (undoubtedly the biggest tech conference in Europe), Florian and I spend our week in Dublin. With the evening activities involving pub crawls, after parties and get-togethers with fellow startuppy people, we definitely had a great time in Ireland. And we also got some important business stuff done.

On Tuesday Advantage Austria had prepared a ‘Pitch Perfect’ seminar for a group of Austrian entrepreneurs. Paul O’Dea (CEO, Select Strategies) warned us right off, that there’s no 1-to-9 plan when it comes to creating a pitch for your company. Using the battle-card canvas, he explained how explaining which problem or pain you’re trying to solve with your product or portfolio for your sweet spot customers, delivering measurable value and beating the competition at the same time, helps you drill down to a paragraph that functions as your larger pitch.

As challenges on the way to a perfect pitch, our group mentioned their struggles with picking the right storyline. And what if the product is very technical? Profiling our sweet spot customer, Paul suggested to filter them by the following ‘characteristics’: Continue Reading “So we attended this Web Summit thing in Dublin…” →

As someone making a living in the startup world, one can not have missed the rise of A/B tests, greatly boosted by Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup.

But what is this A/B testing all about? And how do you make sure you get a data-driven approach to product development right for your website or web application?

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing requires to have two different versions of a page, one being your current version, and the other is the version you want to change the page to. Every A/B experiment starts with a little hypothesis. For instance: in order to drive more traffic towards our signup page we need a friendly green button, instead of the blue one we have currently. To research and justify your changes, you route half your visitors to the first page and half to the second. Next, you monitor how many of the visitors perform the desired action (like sign up for your service) on each page, and you calculate the conversion rate for the old and new page. The page with the highest conversion rate is probably the one you should use.

Continue Reading “The dos and don’ts in A/B testing” →

Adrian Smith is a self-employed software architecture and performance consultant currently working on a platform for HR departments that implements quite a few special features. Adrian decided to use Usersnap for this project, to gather specific feedback from his client during the development process.

“We’re using Usersnap on our dev server as the site isn’t live yet. It helps my client to point out and describe what he’d like to see improved. I like this way of receiving feedback. He can highlight areas of the screen etc., i.e. he can really visually say what’s wrong. Which is of course way better than writing an email following the storyline ‘on the third navigation point, the second area, the 3rd word is in a strange position’!”

Adrian’s core usage is within his development team. Screenshots get delivered to his inbox, where he processes them and divides them into tasks in his project management tool, Liquid Planner. Continue Reading “How Usersnap helps a Software Architect in his development process” →

Nowadays – when building a website – one is confronted with a number of different sizes and browsers that is daunting.* Plus, with mobile adoption skyrocketing, the diversity of mobile devices on the market doesn’t fail to grow exponentially. Thank god / the vivid web design community no custom coding is needed for each device or screen size with current responsive web design frameworks and testing tools.

We’ve selected 6 tools and libraries to get you started with responsive web design:

Bootstrap

Built at Twitter by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, Bootstrap offers an easy configurable CSS front-end framework. Bootstrap was made to not only look and behave great in the latest desktop browsers (as well as IE7!), but also in tablet and smartphone browsers with a 12-column responsive grid, dozens of components, JavaScript plugins, typography, form controls, and has a web-based Customizer. Bootstrap comes in different shapes and forms, like Google Bootstrap, Retriever Bootstrap and the super fun (and equally ugly) Geo Bootstrap. Continue Reading “6 tools to get started with responsive web design” →

Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience. That means: easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling across a gradient of different devices. At Usersnap we think a great deal of Responsive Design, and letting screen capture tools lead the way. Simply re-size your browser window, or open this blog on your smartphone, and you’ll know what we’re talking about. Continue Reading “An Intro to Responsive Web Design” →