"Testing in progress"
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 5:37 am
Whether you make software, make spoons, or make something in between, you probably know that unless your product serves a very narrow market segment and does only a few things, it’s nearly impossible to fully satisfy all of your “potential customers.” That is. When I say potential customers, I mean anyone who might use the product to fulfill a need. Rice-eating kids need small, shallow spoons, and soup-swilling adults need large, deep spoons, but if the only spoons on the dinner table are medium-sized, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll both use it. The more features you add (maybe you make sporks), the more scenarios your product can be used in, but the more you’re betting on your market wanting to get everything you’ve built without seeing it as clutter (read: compromises). Outside of this ideal scenario, the experience of using your product becomes less than perfect, and you'll likely find yourself between different opinions about the "perfect" design ("the star should be taiwanese phone number longer and flatter" a la a fork, versus "the pin should be shorter and deeper" a la a spoon).
When you first decide what to build, the organizational strategy and set of goals define possible directions at the highest level (we build forks for kids). In addition, keen intuition, research, and decision analysis should guide the development of possible tactics to achieve your goals (plastics are popular, they can’t be too sharp, they can’t rust, they have to be short). Many businesses are quite successful (if somewhat arbitrary) in making a final decision and simply committing resources to building it, in part because testing different ideas requires design, implementation, and a feedback process. This can be politically complex, time-consuming, and expensive.
We recently entered the third phase of this major website development cycle. When we first started out, our website had a broad focus with much less direction. After learning from our customers, studying best practices, and drawing conclusions from various analytics tools, we worked through three major redesigns with smaller content changes in between. We finally hit the inevitable A/B testing phase, and Optimizely was the obvious tool of choice. For those of you who visit our website frequently, this means you may find that the content is not where it used to be, or may be in a different form. We’re here to tell you not to worry, “Testing in Progress.” We hope the end result will be more intuitive, digestible, and informative than the original design! We’ll be discussing some of the tests we ran and their results in more detail soon.
And for many of you asking, we are aiming to have the RC Vtiger 6 ready by December 10th. Keep your eyes peeled!
When you first decide what to build, the organizational strategy and set of goals define possible directions at the highest level (we build forks for kids). In addition, keen intuition, research, and decision analysis should guide the development of possible tactics to achieve your goals (plastics are popular, they can’t be too sharp, they can’t rust, they have to be short). Many businesses are quite successful (if somewhat arbitrary) in making a final decision and simply committing resources to building it, in part because testing different ideas requires design, implementation, and a feedback process. This can be politically complex, time-consuming, and expensive.
We recently entered the third phase of this major website development cycle. When we first started out, our website had a broad focus with much less direction. After learning from our customers, studying best practices, and drawing conclusions from various analytics tools, we worked through three major redesigns with smaller content changes in between. We finally hit the inevitable A/B testing phase, and Optimizely was the obvious tool of choice. For those of you who visit our website frequently, this means you may find that the content is not where it used to be, or may be in a different form. We’re here to tell you not to worry, “Testing in Progress.” We hope the end result will be more intuitive, digestible, and informative than the original design! We’ll be discussing some of the tests we ran and their results in more detail soon.
And for many of you asking, we are aiming to have the RC Vtiger 6 ready by December 10th. Keep your eyes peeled!