Monthly Archives: April 2013

Facebook Home on Android: a great way to monetize the addicts

Ephemera, Technology

In many industries, a small proportion of the users will consume a disproportionate amount of the product, and will provide the vast bulk of a company’s profit.

This is true in the beer business for example: the beer companies have long known that a small percentage of their customers will drink a vast amount of beer every day. (This factoid used to be a staple of marketing classes in the 1980s, when it was offered as an example of the 80:20 rule — 20% of the consumers will drink 80% of the beer. Which actually amounts to about a case of beer a day…)

It is also true for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses: Forbes reported in 2011, for example, that just 4% of Dropbox’s users pay for the service, and yet Dropbox is a growing, profitable company! The other 96% contribute indirectly, by adding to the network effect and recruiting others who have a 4% probability of becoming a paid-up subscriber of Dropbox.

These percentages can seem small, but they can quickly add up when you have millions of users.

Facebook has a similar profile of users: a small number of people are logged in obsessively, and these will provide the bulk of their advertising revenues — not just because they are more like to see the advertisements, but because they are more likely to view Facebook as a trusted source of useful content.

In this context, creating Facebook Home on Android makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t matter whether a very large proportion of your user base never uses it, if you can get the addicted segment to be logged in all the time. These people will drink all the beer you are selling.

Facebook Home on Android: a great way to monetize the addicts

Ephemera, Technology

In many industries, a small proportion of the users will consume a disproportionate amount of the product, and will provide the vast bulk of a company’s profit.

This is true in the beer business for example: the beer companies have long known that a small percentage of their customers will drink a vast amount of beer every day. (This factoid used to be a staple of marketing classes in the 1980s, when it was offered as an example of the 80:20 rule — 20% of the consumers will drink 80% of the beer. Which actually amounts to about a case of beer a day…)

It is also true for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses: Forbes reported in 2011, for example, that just 4% of Dropbox’s users pay for the service, and yet Dropbox is a growing, profitable company! The other 96% contribute indirectly, by adding to the network effect and recruiting others who have a 4% probability of becoming a paid-up subscriber of Dropbox.

These percentages can seem small, but they can quickly add up when you have millions of users.

Facebook has a similar profile of users: a small number of people are logged in obsessively, and these will provide the bulk of their advertising revenues — not just because they are more like to see the advertisements, but because they are more likely to view Facebook as a trusted source of useful content.

In this context, creating Facebook Home on Android makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t matter whether a very large proportion of your user base never uses it, if you can get the addicted segment to be logged in all the time. These people will drink all the beer you are selling.

How Kerika integrates with your Google Contacts

Technology, Usability

When you sign up for Kerika, using your Google ID, you get sent to an authorization screen where Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to access some of your Google-related information. One part of this involves access to your Google Contacts.

We often get queries about this, so we thought we would clarify something that’s really important: we don’t use your Google contacts to spam your friends and coworkers!

The Google Contacts are used for one reason only: to provide an auto-completion of names and email addresses when you are adding people to a project team. Here’s a simple illustration:

Adding people to a project team
Adding people to a project team

To add people to a project team, you would click on the People button, which appears on the top-right corner of the Kerika application, and this would show a display similar to the example above, where all the members of your project team are listed (along with their roles). To add a new person, you would click on the +Member link at the top, and then start typing in a name or email address:

Enter a name or email address
Enter a name or email address

As you type in a name or email address, we pass on this string to Google which tries to match it up with entries in your Google contacts. These entries start showing up immediately, and get filtered progressively as you type in more characters:

Matching names against your Google Contacts
Matching names against your Google Contacts

This matching of names and emails is done by Google, which means Kerika never has direct access to your Google Contacts!

This auto-completion is a handy feature: it eliminates a major source of errors, which is mistyping email addresses. This means that the chances of you inviting the wrong person to your project are much lower!

 

 

Making sure you never miss a project update

Usability,

In addition to the styling changes we have made, we have also been working to make sure you always have easy access to your project updates, by improving and extending the onscreen notifications you get from Kerika. There are a whole bunch of improvements in our newest version:

  • Kerika reminds you when you are hiding a column on a task board: using the Workflow button, you can always personalize your view of a task board, hiding some columns if they are not of interest. Now, Kerika makes sure you don’t forget that you have some columns hidden, by showing a small indicator above the Workflow button:

    Indicator that you are hiding some columns on your task board
    Indicator that you are hiding some columns on your task board
  • And, if there are updates to cards on columns that you are hiding, these will never get missed:
    Updates on cards that I am not viewing
    Updates on cards that I am not viewing

    Clicking on the Workflow button will show you clearly which hidden columns have updates:

    Updates on hidden cards
    Updates on hidden cards

    In the example above, the “This Sprint” and “In Development” columns are currently hidden from view, and there are updates to cards on the “In Development” column.

  • If you have several projects underway, Kerika makes it easier than ever to know which of them have updates that you haven’t seen. This is done in two places in the user interface: first, your project tabs show orange indicators when there are unread notifications:
    Updates are highlighted on project tabs
    Updates are highlighted on project tabs

    And, when you are browsing your list of projects, you see orange highlights on the project cards as well, to let you know there are unread updates:

    Updates are highlighted on project cards
    Updates are highlighted on project cards
  • And, finally, a new feature makes it easy for you to find updated cards within columns, which is especially useful when you are dealing with a lot of cards, e.g. in a Product Backlog:

    Finding the next updated card in a column
    Finding the next updated card in a column

As with all our product improvements, the Kerika team has been testing the changes extensively by “dogfooding” the software: we use Kerika for all of our work, and we have been very pleased with these improvements which have really improved our own team productivity!

 

A cleaner look to Kerika: more open, more fun, and with clearer highlights

Usability

We have some styling changes in our latest version of Kerika, which we think makes the user interface seem more open and inviting, and makes it even easier to see highlights and notifications.

The new styling is something that we had been mulling over for a while: a number of users had said that the old styling was a little “too grey” (our thanks to Yakup Trana for being among the earliest to provide this feedback). The new styling essentially reverses the old look of grey cards on a white background.

The new look for your project cards is like this:

New look for project cards
New look for project cards

The cards are easier to read, and more clearly defined. (We have also tweaked the color of the grey border around the cards, to make it slightly darker which makes for a crisper look.) A lot of the old horizontal lines have been removed as well, which makes for a cleaner look. By contrast, this is the old styling:

Old view of project cards
Old view of project cards

The contrast between the two is quite dramatic: the new Kerika is a lot cleaner and more inviting!

The new look for your task cards is like this:

New view of task cards
New view of task cards

Task cards are easier to read, and the important highlights and notifications are also more crisply delivered. Here, by contrast, is the old Kerika styling:

Old view of task cards
Old view of task cards

Once again, a dramatic contrast, and clearly for the better! We have been testing this new styling within the Kerika team for the past 3 weeks, and have been continually tweaking it on a daily basis. We now feel it is the best we can do! Let us know what you think.

A cleaner look to Kerika: more open, more fun, and with clearer highlights

Usability

We have some styling changes in our latest version of Kerika, which we think makes the user interface seem more open and inviting, and makes it even easier to see highlights and notifications.

The new styling is something that we had been mulling over for a while: a number of users had said that the old styling was a little “too grey” (our thanks to Yakup Trana for being among the earliest to provide this feedback). The new styling essentially reverses the old look of grey cards on a white background.

The new look for your project cards is like this:

New look for project cards
New look for project cards

The cards are easier to read, and more clearly defined. (We have also tweaked the color of the grey border around the cards, to make it slightly darker which makes for a crisper look.) A lot of the old horizontal lines have been removed as well, which makes for a cleaner look. By contrast, this is the old styling:

Old view of project cards
Old view of project cards

The contrast between the two is quite dramatic: the new Kerika is a lot cleaner and more inviting!

The new look for your task cards is like this:

New view of task cards
New view of task cards

Task cards are easier to read, and the important highlights and notifications are also more crisply delivered. Here, by contrast, is the old Kerika styling:

Old view of task cards
Old view of task cards

Once again, a dramatic contrast, and clearly for the better! We have been testing this new styling within the Kerika team for the past 3 weeks, and have been continually tweaking it on a daily basis. We now feel it is the best we can do! Let us know what you think.

Google Plus doesn’t seem to like TIFF files; Mac’s Grab and Preview utilities are more annoying than ever…

Usability

We just encountered a weird bug in Google+: after being prompted over several days to upload a larger image as our cover photo, we decided to get a larger screenshot of the Kerika application.

On a Mac, there are several ways of doing this, but the most direct way is to use Mac’s Grab utility. This utility used to be a lot easier to use before Mountain Lion’s “improvements”: now, Grab disappears after you switch to another application, using the Cmd-Tab keys, which is really annoying because you have to relaunch it all the time.

But, that isn’t really our main beef right now… One long-standing annoyance of Grab is that it saves files in the TIFF format. We have no idea why: TIFF seems like a really ancient format these days.

If you try to upload a TIFF file to Google+, however, the file shows up inverted for some reason. This seems to be a weird bug on Google’s part: TIFF files, alone, are being inverted when they are uploaded.

To get around this, you have to save your TIFF-based screenshot as a PNG file (or JPEG, but then you have to make sure you don’t lose resolution in the process). This means opening the TIFF file in your Mac’s Preview utility, and then trying to save that as a PNG file.

Saving a file as a different type used to be simple with the old Preview, but no more: another one of Apple’s annoying “improvements” has been to eliminate the “Save As…” option from Preview’s File menu. So, you have to do something completely counter-intuitive: you need to duplicate the file, using the Duplicate option of the File menu, and then close that new window. Closing the new window alarms Preview enough to prompt you to save the file, at which point you are finally presented with a dialog box that lets you select the file type you want.

And then it’s back to Google+ to upload your new PNG screenshot…

Google and Apple are considered the leaders in usability, so there we have it: this is the state of the art!