Category: Web Development

Every good web team should have at least one designer and one developer. I think we can all agree this is out of the question. Of course, you will need to have other “titles” to keep everything going, but today we will focus on these two because we think we can help you make them more efficient without hacking their comfort zone.

We know that because we are a team of designers and developers and we are using the same approach. It helps us work better together, be more efficient and have fun at the same time.

What is the problem anyway?

If you are running an agency or a web project team you probably heard conversations like this one:

I am sure you have similar misunderstandings in your own team. The problem is that the designer is approaching the problem differently compared to the programmer.

For him/her moving a layer 3 pixels left is 11 milliseconds, but for example, this can be 30 min of work for a developer and usually, he/she will use the same words – “move this layer 3 px left, please”. There is no such thing like layer for the programmer.

On one hand, you’ve got the designer’s creativity and thinking about the details and on the other hand is the way how the programmer thinks about a problem and what is his/her approach to finding a solution.

Let’s not go deeper but this is a problem and we know how to easily solve it.

The Solution

I’ll keep telling you how we actually solve issues like that in our team and in our clients’ teams.

Please read carefully because this is how you can solve your communication issues, make your team more efficient and ultimately have 8 man-hours more per week. That’s a whole day!

We are using something called “visual annotated screenshots” in order to help designers and developers to be on the same page.

Instead of “Can you move this (pointing at your monitor) 3 pixels to the left?” how about this?

The designer can show what exactly he/she needs, using the tools that any designer is familiar with.

The developer will get a bug report in the project management system you are using with all the necessary details, plus:

• browser version
• operating system
• screen size

and more data automatically collected to help them work better and to understand what the designer needs exactly.

The staging server

Most of the successful web projects are using a server where they can deploy the current snapshots of the projects so developers, designers and the rest of the team, we will not mention in this article, can work together.

Usersnap can be installed on this server with just few lines of code and will bridge the communication gap between programmers and developers. Now they are on the same planet (remember the title).

They live on the “Completed on time”-continent.

Do you have the same problem?

Probably if you are reading this and if you are here, you do. So let’s get started? Oh, if you don’t have a staging server, don’t worry, you can use Usersnap on any server and website.

(Also feel free to forward the instruction to someone who is responsible for setting up things like that)

1. Sign-up for an account with us by clicking here. It’s free for 15 days and we will not take your credit card now.

2. Log in and configure your first project:

3. Hit Save and use the code that will appear to embed Usersnap to your web project.

4. While there, take a look at the right side of your browser – here you can set up where the feedback will be delivered – you can use bug tracking system, project management system, helpdesk software or even your own internal solution

Not convinced yet

Feel free to contact us by writing help@usersnap.com.  It’s always nice to know who we are working for day and night.

Usersnap is a great tool to help you give your clients the web design of their dreams. But you gotta get those clients first. We ran into Quote Roller at the Pioneers Conference in Vienna last month and we just knew we each had tools to help each other’s customers with their feedback.

We share a growing base of rockstar web designers, graphic designers, SEO saviors and other small creative businesses just looking for fast and easy ways to show off their work and close more deals.

Quote Roller is a business proposal software that allows you to create, send, track and get legally, electronically signed sales quotes in minutes. Instead of simply writing boring, boilerplate content, why not use your proposal as a way to both address your clients’ needs and to show off your work? We say, instead of spending pages writing what you can do, show them!

Continue Reading “How to automate your Web Design Sales” →

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…” →

At Usersnap, we have over 20 (summed up) years of experience in well organized web development. We figured that track record allows us to call out the good, bad and the ugly in the industry. Now, working in web development can be rewarding, challenging and overall awesome, but the programming world has its dark side too (and no, there are no cookies).

Continue Reading “6 ugly habits in web development” →

Collaboration of the kind where everyone is involved, and able to discuss projects and tasks while you as a manager still having full control over what they can see and do, can be tricky. ActiveCollab is a project collaboration hub for teams that solves that problem. And with Usersnap hooked up to activeCollab, you can easily gather feedback during your development process. Having all project data in one, centralized place is extremely valuable as everyone knows where to get the most up to date information and collaboration and notification tools are built right into the workflow.

People, Roles and Permissions

With activeCollab, there’s no limit to the number of users that you can invite.

Continue Reading “activeCollab: A Collaboration Hub for Your Team” →

There are hundreds of SaaS startups advice blog posts. Many of them are based on a couple of experiences the respective founders made which are sometimes being presented as universal truth applicable to every startup. What frequently is missing is the context of the writer. So here’s my context: I’m an entrepreneur, I established a single successful (aka profitable) software boutique with my brother before we started to work on Usersnap (a B2B SaaS product), and we failed with another business idea. I’m older than the average startup founders and I did not drop out of university. I’m living in Austria, and I prefer the term “starting a business” instead of “running a startup”.

Disclosing this background, I’d like to share 3 observations I made in the last months.

Thoughts about finding Advisors

Limited life experiences + Over-generalization = Advice
Paul Buchheit, Founder of FriendFeed and creator of Gmail

I’m amazed how many people show the self-confidence to call themselves startup-advisors. At some point, I even got the impression that some failed startup entrepreneurs believe they’ll be able to advise other startups with a rationale that a set of experienced mistakes empowers them to guide fellow startups.

To me, that’s a misconceived plan B. Whereas I strongly believe that sharing failure with other entrepreneurs is very valuable I don’t think this is what advising is about. Continue Reading “3 Tips for SaaS Startups: Advisors, Math and Blind Spots” →

At Usersnap, we have over 20 (summed up) years of experience in well organized web development. We figured that track record allows us to call out the good, bad and the ugly in the industry. Now, we don’t like to focus on the negative, but just this once we’ll sum up the bad, as the logical follow-up on our post on best practices in web development.

1. Mails with 20 bullet points

Mails with 20 bullet points, listing bugs, feature request and what not, are as much a commodity as a problem. Often they lead to accusations and “why didn’t you fix $XY, as I pointed out five weeks ago?”-s. In case your head of development is not able to drill these monologues down to workable tickets, chances are you forget things. Instead of muttering all kinds of things your mother didn’t teach you, try and educate your clients or managers how to use a bug tracker or project management tool.* That way you both save time sending countless lengthy emails, and they’ll have a better view of what you’re currently working on.

2. CC’ing the whole team

CC’ing all means: you have no idea who can solve this task. Which is bad in itself. If you start doing this, potentially no one will answer or feel responsible. Plus: reading all those mails will kill a lot of precious time for those who are not into it. Find out who is responsible and address that person only. Continue Reading “6 bad habits in web development” →

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” →

At Usersnap, we have over 20 (summed up) years of experience in well organized web development. We figured that track record allows us to call out the good, the bad and the ugly in the industry. Let’s start with the positive stuff.

1. Use a bug tracker

The inbox of a Head of Development tends to fill up over the day with feature requests, bug reports and snippets of user feedback. Sometimes you’ll even receive emails with a whole bullet point list (if you’re lucky) of requirements, pain points and random ideas. While it’s great that people take the time to give – at times very extended – feedback, it’s not really useful as is.

Using a bug tracker / project management solution like Basecamp or Trac you can reorder tickets and nothing gets lost, as tasks are only closed when they are done. Set a milestone, add keywords (so your co-workers can find your ticket easily), add a priority level and make sure to cc the person in charge of ‘fixing it’. Even if that’s yours truly. In the description, try to provide a user story. And make sure your summary is descriptive, you can use humor for your commit messages if you really have to (i.e.: when it’s done), but you’ll want your ticket to be clear.

2. Take responsibility

Be precise and targeted. You should know who can do what and who is available for an additional task. When in real doubt about who’s responsible, you can do a CC. But make sure to remove all others from the CC, as soon as you found the right person to assign the ticket to. Continue Reading “8 good habits in web development” →