Learnings From eSassy
In addition to being a great web site for social shopping, eSassy has also given me a great education. I've learned about the latest trends in how to build an interesting online destination. Plus, it’s a forcing function to get me to internalize the things people talk about: how to make sites fun and exciting, attract users, and do efficient development. In this post, I’ll try to share a few of the things I’ve learned during the process.
First, the development process. As many of you know, eSassy has been developed completely off-shore. My experience has been nothing short of wonderful, with excellent communication with the development team, primarily via Instant Messenger. We have tried Skype in the past, but find that IM provides the fastest communication mechanism. It’s a really remarkable thing when you find people that you can communicate with via a sort of short-hand.
As part of the development process, we have used Mantis for bug tracking. Once we got to a “V2” of the web site, we moved into a phase where I entered all bugs and features into mantis. The team then resolves bugs in mantis as they go through them. A real bug tracking system is always better than using Excel spreadsheets or the like because it provides a centralized location where the latest bug information is up to date for both the developers and those specifying the product. It also makes it easy to set bug priorities, which makes it easy to determine in what order to fix bugs and implement features.
From a design perspective, we re-vamped the entire design of the site. The old design was centered around the toolbar, which originally was the focus on the site. But it turns out that people don’t really care about the toolbar, they care about the look and feel of the site. We did a few things to make the site more current and happening in addition to the new look and feel. In the upper right corner, we have changing tag lines. This means users see something new and different every time they come to the site. We tried to make these edgy so as to be fun for users to see and so they would want to come back to read the new lines.
In the main area of the page, we tried to make the look and feel a lot more accessible with our “1, 2, 3” model, and a focus on signing up. We added hot products and eSassy shoppers to the front of the site. These are pulled directly from the database and change every time you go to the site. Again, this helps the site be more dynamic and draws users in by making it more about people and products – which is what shopping is all about, and less about the technology of the site.
We opened the site up. This means that wishlists and user profiles are accessible even if you are not logged in. Not only does this provide more pages for the search engine spiders to crawl, but it also makes the site a lot more accessible and functional even if you are not logged in or actively shopping. Users and potential users now have more opportunities to interact with the site. It’s also more fun – you can browse through people’s product lists and profiles and see what’s going on.
We added the ability to publish your wishlist on your own web site, blog, online profile, etc. This has the potential to drive traffic to the site and it gives people a way to integrate eSassy into their existing online presence. Finally, we added a Quick Tour. It would be cool if some day this were a video or interactive in some way, but better to have something there than nothing (which is what we used to have).
What are the takeaways so far?
Make it rapid. Development can and should happen at a very rapid pace. I am a bigger fan than ever before of “ship early, ship often.” Especially with an online (hosted) product (whether for enterprise or consumer), you can revise quickly and see the effect immediately. You can do this with software that has to be installed but somehow, and it’s hard to quantify, this is all the more so with online offerings.
Make it current. Today’s sites can’t be static. You have to deliver content that is fresh, new, and relevant to users. Don’t focus on the technology – focus on the users and the products. That’s why showing actual users and products on the front of the site is so important. Different taglines gives the site a little edginess and bit of zing.
Make it easy. We didn’t realize that a lot of users were getting confused during the installation process. They thought they had to shop from the eSassy site, when in fact the model is for them to shop from any site and then use the toolbar to add items to their wishlist or that of a friend. Some simple instructions on the site can go a long way to helping users understand how things work.
Get the word out. By giving away something for free (a little eSassy wishlist that users can include on their own sites, online profiles, blogs, etc.), we make it easy for users to get excited about and promote eSassy. Rather than forcing them to choose between eSassy and where they already reside online, we make it possible for them to integrate those two things.
Make it offshore. Granted, perhaps not all of your development can or should be done off-shore. But some of it should. Even if you just start with a component or some product testing, to remain competitive you can and should do this. Good off-shore development does not occur overnight: it takes time to build an effective relationship and communication and work schedules.
Make it open. By opening up the site, we made it more accessible, more friendly, and more useful. This means more search engine listings and more user interest.
Make it personal. It can be easy to forget that technology, design, and functionality are all just pieces that underlie something much, much more important: your users. By promoting our users and the products they’re interested in on the front page of the site, we make their experience all the more interesting, both to them and to others.
Now, start shopping with eSassy!
First, the development process. As many of you know, eSassy has been developed completely off-shore. My experience has been nothing short of wonderful, with excellent communication with the development team, primarily via Instant Messenger. We have tried Skype in the past, but find that IM provides the fastest communication mechanism. It’s a really remarkable thing when you find people that you can communicate with via a sort of short-hand.
As part of the development process, we have used Mantis for bug tracking. Once we got to a “V2” of the web site, we moved into a phase where I entered all bugs and features into mantis. The team then resolves bugs in mantis as they go through them. A real bug tracking system is always better than using Excel spreadsheets or the like because it provides a centralized location where the latest bug information is up to date for both the developers and those specifying the product. It also makes it easy to set bug priorities, which makes it easy to determine in what order to fix bugs and implement features.
From a design perspective, we re-vamped the entire design of the site. The old design was centered around the toolbar, which originally was the focus on the site. But it turns out that people don’t really care about the toolbar, they care about the look and feel of the site. We did a few things to make the site more current and happening in addition to the new look and feel. In the upper right corner, we have changing tag lines. This means users see something new and different every time they come to the site. We tried to make these edgy so as to be fun for users to see and so they would want to come back to read the new lines.
In the main area of the page, we tried to make the look and feel a lot more accessible with our “1, 2, 3” model, and a focus on signing up. We added hot products and eSassy shoppers to the front of the site. These are pulled directly from the database and change every time you go to the site. Again, this helps the site be more dynamic and draws users in by making it more about people and products – which is what shopping is all about, and less about the technology of the site.
We opened the site up. This means that wishlists and user profiles are accessible even if you are not logged in. Not only does this provide more pages for the search engine spiders to crawl, but it also makes the site a lot more accessible and functional even if you are not logged in or actively shopping. Users and potential users now have more opportunities to interact with the site. It’s also more fun – you can browse through people’s product lists and profiles and see what’s going on.
We added the ability to publish your wishlist on your own web site, blog, online profile, etc. This has the potential to drive traffic to the site and it gives people a way to integrate eSassy into their existing online presence. Finally, we added a Quick Tour. It would be cool if some day this were a video or interactive in some way, but better to have something there than nothing (which is what we used to have).
What are the takeaways so far?
Make it rapid. Development can and should happen at a very rapid pace. I am a bigger fan than ever before of “ship early, ship often.” Especially with an online (hosted) product (whether for enterprise or consumer), you can revise quickly and see the effect immediately. You can do this with software that has to be installed but somehow, and it’s hard to quantify, this is all the more so with online offerings.
Make it current. Today’s sites can’t be static. You have to deliver content that is fresh, new, and relevant to users. Don’t focus on the technology – focus on the users and the products. That’s why showing actual users and products on the front of the site is so important. Different taglines gives the site a little edginess and bit of zing.
Make it easy. We didn’t realize that a lot of users were getting confused during the installation process. They thought they had to shop from the eSassy site, when in fact the model is for them to shop from any site and then use the toolbar to add items to their wishlist or that of a friend. Some simple instructions on the site can go a long way to helping users understand how things work.
Get the word out. By giving away something for free (a little eSassy wishlist that users can include on their own sites, online profiles, blogs, etc.), we make it easy for users to get excited about and promote eSassy. Rather than forcing them to choose between eSassy and where they already reside online, we make it possible for them to integrate those two things.
Make it offshore. Granted, perhaps not all of your development can or should be done off-shore. But some of it should. Even if you just start with a component or some product testing, to remain competitive you can and should do this. Good off-shore development does not occur overnight: it takes time to build an effective relationship and communication and work schedules.
Make it open. By opening up the site, we made it more accessible, more friendly, and more useful. This means more search engine listings and more user interest.
Make it personal. It can be easy to forget that technology, design, and functionality are all just pieces that underlie something much, much more important: your users. By promoting our users and the products they’re interested in on the front page of the site, we make their experience all the more interesting, both to them and to others.
Now, start shopping with eSassy!
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