Marketing & User Experience Mistakes Software Developers Commonly Make
Published September 28, 2011
In the desktop software world, the one thing that strikes the most fear in the hearts of developers of great applications is (cue the dramatic music) — DROP-OFF! Drop-off happens for a variety of reasons but causes the same end result: your software is never used. Worse, in our research, up to 40% of downloaded software is never even installed! Ouch!
So let’s explore some common issues that contribute to higher drop-off, or put another way: Why aren’t people successfully installing my software?
The Download Process (It certainly is a process…)
I won’t detail the importance of making sure your download is easily accessible from your site and syndicated to safe, popular download sites. You’ve done all that, so where and why are they dropping off? The fact is that many users, even today, are totally confused about what to do after downloading a file. Yes, shocking… but true.
Part of the solution is to help people understand how to initiate your installer by providing browser and (even better) OS-specific download landing pages with information about what to do next. Take Dropbox as a great example of how to do it right.
Install Initiated
Next comes the crucial point of guiding the user through your installation process while providing appropriate disclosure(s)—such as your End User License Agreement—and any other screens that add value to their experience.
The “classic” ‘Welcome Screen’ that says “Hey, this is ACME Software! You ready to install? Okay then, CLICK NEXT!” is unnecessary. Instead, for example, you can combine the welcome screen with your EULA. Provide users options to make informed choices, but don’t overburden them with 20 installation screens. “Default” or “quick” installation options help less-tech savvy users to easily and successfully install your software, while providing an “Advanced” option allows app-addicts total control. The bottom line is: Eliminate unnecessary screens. If that’s not possible, consolidate screens — without overwhelming people.
NOTE: If you include or recommend third-party software in your installer, you must provide the ability to easily opt-out of such offers on an install screen. While OpenCandy’s Software Network Policies are requirements for working with us, they’re also a great blueprint that any developer can use to ensure a safe & positive user experience.
Prerequisite What?
If your software requires prerequisite software, make it easy for users to install programs they don’t have. At the most basic level, ensure your installer detects whether necessary prerequisites are already installed! Be aware that the more prerequisites you need to install during your software’s installation, the higher the chance of a problem occurring and the lower the likelihood of a successful installation.
First Launch aka SHOWTIME!
Your software is now installed and the user has launched it for the first time. What do you do? Provide users with information about how to use the MOST important feature(s) so they can quickly get value from using your software.
A few ways to engage users at first-launch:
- Launch a guide on your website
- Walk through with screenshots
- Display a video
- Guide them to the help file
TechSmith does a great job with Snagit of handling first-launch by asking if you’re a new user. If you click yes, it loads their website and a screencast to quickly get you up to speed:
Show people how to use your software to solve the problem they have. At the very least, tell them where to get help.
Turning Users Into Evangelists
The ease of discovering, downloading, initiating an install, successfully completing the install, and getting someone to launch your software, are all part of what I call the “Software Courting Ritual”. It can turn someone merely interested in your software into a passionate, engaged user that EVANGELIZES it! Make your *total* user experience delightful and the success should follow.
That’s it for now. Good luck! Let us know in the comments what has worked to lower your drop-off and have fun creating happy users!
PS: Here are some great articles about user experience in relation to marketing:
- Marketing IS User Experience by Hillel on Jackson Fish Market blog
- Top 10 Tools to Measure User Experience by Giovanni Calabro on Pragmatic Marketing
- What marketing executives should know about user experience by Nick Myers on The Cooper Journal (Don’t let the title scare you off as it almost did me ;) — you don’t need to be a “marketing exec” to read or appreciate the post.)
Dr. Apps — Follow me on Twitter!
Software Community Guru for SweetLabs
This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
(Material Disclosure: Neither Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs received compensation for the creation or posting of this content from any third-party services or software mentioned within.
7 Twitter Tools for Software Developers
Published September 16, 2011
Recently my colleague Alastair and I posted “19 Twitter Tips for Software Developers” and concluded by saying we’d follow up with a post highlighting some awesome Twitter tools. Which brings us to the following list of apps, tools, and services I’ve found invaluable for anyone aiming to get the most out of Twitter.
These tools enhance your Twitter experience by filling in the gaps within Twitter’s current native offerings, namely: better historical search, user analytics, sentiment analysis, tweet scheduling and more. Most of the tools are free, but some offer a free version with limited capabilities and an affordable “pro” or “premium” version with enhanced features. Enjoy!
TweetDeck
First a preface… If you plan to, or are already heavily using Twitter, you are better off using a standalone app instead of Twitter’s native web GUI. Thankfully, there are tons of third-party Twitter clients available for pretty much every platform and device on the planet.
One of the most popular clients, and the one I’ve been using for the last few years, is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free and powerful multi-platform Twitter client. It provides a multi-paned interface that easily lets you add columns which display information you choose, such as your followers’ tweets, @mentions, DMs, Twitter searches (the modern day “equivalent” of Twitter Track, RIP) and more.
TweetDeck also supports multiple accounts (as well other services like Facebook). There are way too many features and services tied into Tweetdeck to mention here, but I wanted to scratch the surface. TweetDeck was once a third-party app, but the company was snatched up by Twitter in May.
NON-shameless plug:
If TweetDeck is too heavy for your needs, consider a more “lightweight” Twitter client. I’m a
bit biased, but Tweeki which was built using *and* is distributed through the Pokki
platform (made by SweetLabs), is not only beautiful — as evidenced from tweets by people
using it — it contains the right features for beginning tweeters and those who want
to tweet quickly and get real-time notifications on their taskbar. Note that Pokki
is only available for Windows 7 right now, but XP/Vista and even Mac
support will come in the future.
FriendOrFollow
FriendOrFollow is a free, easy-to-use web service which enables you to input your Twitter handle (…or someone else’s) and get back a list of people whom: you’re following but aren’t following you back (“Following”), “Fans”– people who follow you that you don’t follow back (yet), and “Friends” — people you follow whom also follow you. FriendOrFollow also allows you to export the “Following”, “Fans”, or “Friends” lists to a CSV file.
DoesFollow
DoesFollow is a dead-simple, free service that shows you if Twitter user ‘A’ follows user ‘B’ and vice versa. DoesFollow recently added the ability to show you whether a Twitter list you specify contains a specific Twitter user. Check out Damon Clinkscales (@damon), the creator of DoesFollow on Twitter.
Social Mention
Social Mention offers one of the most comprehensive real-time social media search and analytics services I’ve seen – for free! It scans over 75 – mostly — social services for the keywords (or Twitter username) you search for and gives you an at-a-glance look at the “strength”, “sentiment” ratio, “passion” and “reach” of the query.
The real-time search results page Social Mention provides also features a more detailed breakdown of sentiment (positive, negative, neutral), top keywords, top users, top hashtags (e.g. #software) and sources (e.g. StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) related to your search.
You can also setup Social Mention to send email alerts or subscribe to an RSS feed for your searches, as well as export the results to a CSV file. All that and they also have an API, as well as an easy way to embed a “query” widget on your website.
Snap Bird
Snap Bird is a free Twitter search service that goes beyond what’s currently provided by Twitter’s native search (RIP Summize!). Simply input a Twitter handle, sprinkle in some keywords and let Snap Bird do the magic of finding the (public) tweet you know exists but can’t seem to re-discover. If you want to connect Snap Bird to your Twitter account you can also run searches to find old DMs and a few other neat tricks.
TweetEffect
TweetEffect is a rather unique tool in the Twitter universe because it aims to provide insight into the effect specific tweets have on your “followership.” Simply enter your Twitter handle and it scans your tweets to (loosely) determine whether certain tweets caused people to follow or unfollow you. I think some people might construe TweetEffect as a novelty service; but I believe real value of TweetEffect is the data it provides that could help you better shape the type of content that resonates with your “audience”. Don’t sleep on TweetEffect.
Buffer
Buffer is a nifty new tool/service in the market that allows you to create and schedule tweets to help you space out the timing of tweets so you don’t inundate (and possibly turn off) your followers or even possibly discourage new people from following you. Buffer also serves up randomly generated tweets (mostly motivational in nature) that you can choose to add to your “buffer”. Buffer offers specified times during the day to send your tweets or you can customize the times manually. At Buffer’s current rate of user growth, I expect to see a lot more from them in the future. (That, or Twitter buys them… Or bakes in a scheduling service they create).
Buffer tip: For software developers, consider using Buffer for announcing new software releases — using different messaging, and posted in between other tweets so you don’t bombard your followers with the same “themed” tweets — to maximize the possible number of people who will see your tweet, which hopefully translates into more people visiting your site and downloading your software! Remember, not everyone is in the same time zone. ;)
That’s it for now! There are so many tools, apps and services I couldn’t squeeze in here, so please share what you use in the comments!
Dr. Apps — Follow me on Twitter!
Software Community Guru for SweetLabs
This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
(Material Disclosure: Tweeki is made by SweetLabs. Neither Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs received compensation for the creation or posting of this content from any third-party services or software mentioned within.
4 “Code Sharing” Services Great for Developers
Published September 1, 2011
As a desktop app or web developer, there’s always that “one” time you need a “second set of eyes” to help you quickly fix a piece of code that’s causing you headaches, or those times when you simply need to collaborate with someone. This is exactly why every developer needs at least one great code sharing or “paste” site in their arsenal. These services allow you to easily upload text (code) to a website for public (or private) viewing. Sometimes called “code sharing” or “code snippet” services, they are most commonly known as “pastebins.”
Any ole “pastebin” service has standard features like syntax highlighting and archiving, so I honed in on some that support advanced functionality like code compilation, debugging and more. Here are four of the best “code sharing” services that should be on every developer’s short-list and added to your toolkit.
1 – Ideone
Ideone (which is Italian for “great ideas”), would like to be known as an “online midi IDE and debugging tool” instead of a paste service. Sounds like a legitimate request since Ideone boasts the ability to compile, run and debug code from over 40 programming languages! They also have an API which has been used to create mobile apps as well as some really nifty things like “Run This!” which lets you run snippets from your blog. Ideone doesn’t support password-protected pastes that can be shared (you can make a paste that only you can see though) or diffs, but depending on your situation those may be minor quibbles when you consider how useful their offering is.
2 – Gist
If you’re familiar with GitHub, the web-based hosting service for developers using the Git version control system, than you may know Gist. Gist is Github’s code paste/sharing service which is tightly integrated with the GitHub platform. Gist leverages GitHub’s architecture such that all gists are automatically git repositories. This means you get versioning and the ability to fork built right in! Thus, every gist is also reusable as a git repository (little recursion there). In addition, Gist also supports private gists, diffs and SSL.
3 – Codepad
Codepad, like Ideone is unique in that it’s not just a pasting service – it’s also an online compiler/interpreter. Currently Codepad supports 13 languages, private pastes (not password protected, private just means a noindex tag is used to prevent indexing by search engines) and you can choose whether you want to execute the pasted code or not. There’s also a Codepad Vim plugin and Emacs integration available. Check out their about page for some cool details about the service.
4 – Pastebin
The “original” pastebin service established in 2002, Pastebin now boasts of more than 8 million active pastes (they say 1/3 of all pastes are private). Pastebin supports syntax highlighting for more languages than any other pasting service I’ve seen. Pastebin has desktop apps for Windows and Mac, as well as browser extensions and mobile device apps (iOS, WebOS and Android) as well as an API so you can build your own app or service. Be sure to check out the “Trending Pastes”, you never know what type of interesting things you’ll find there (admittedly most are non-code related).
Missed a mention for a pastebin service you love? Let us know in the comments which one we left out and why you love it!
Happy pasting, sharing and collaborating!
Dr. Apps — Follow me on Twitter!
Software Community Guru for SweetLabs
This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
(Material Disclosure: None. Neither Dr. Apps, OpenCandy or SweetLabs has received compensation from the makers of any software mentioned for the creation or posting of this content.
Image source: Geek and Poke — The Real Coder, http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2011/02/the-real-coder.html
