Let me start out by saying that quantitative feedback about your website visitors is critical.  Here at Demoing, we use Google Analytics, and its wonderful.  Through their platform you garner info about who is visiting your site, what pages they're traveling to, how long between visits, what browser, what operating system they're running, and numerous other items.

The information garnered from the analytics is very valuable...it just doesn't tell you the whole story. I'm currently reading Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems and it provides a lot of insight into the value of qualitative analysis.

I want to step you through a few instances where quantitative feedback integration on your website with platforms such as Google Analytics falls short and how integrating a robust qualitative feedback platform can address those needs.

• You're a Brand New Website and Don't Have a Critical Mass to Garner Meaningful Data.

You need insightful feedback from individuals who can tell you meaningful information.  As you build you need to hear whats wrong with your color scheme, that your service explanation is confusing, that user's didn't expect to see your personal biography when they clicked 'about us', and so on.  With a solid qualitative feedback integration plan you can garner that feedback at early stages and make sure what you're building makes sense.

• You're in Private Beta.

Implementing a feedback loop in your private beta testing is crucial.  In this process you need to make sure you bring in as many appropriate individuals as possible.  During this process you need to make sure that you are testing key elements around your value prop and that you are appropriately valuing the feedback and acting on the correct items.  A valuable approach is to start an ongoing conversation with testers as you iterate on items of concern.

• You're Making a New Version of Your Site.

Amazon takes an approach of sending a fraction of a percent of traffic to new versions of pages, and seeing how that goes over.  That's great, but they're still missing out on commentary from those users on their experience.  Having the development team see aggregated feedback on the pages is incredibly valuable.  Now not only does your development team learn that only 10% of users clicked on part of the page, but the qualitative feedback from x users who were enthralled by the video playing at the top of the page gives valuable insight into how to augment design/function.  This is where quantitative feedback stops and actionable qualitative feedback comes into play.

In conclusion, we feel that not only do websites need to have an 'always on' quantitative solution, but can benefit from an additional qualitative solution to make sure they are staying deeply in touch with their users.

What situations have you encountered that would have been solved better with Qualitative v. Quantitative data?

Drop you comments below!

As the demoing team continues to develop out our platform, we wanted to write up a post on some of our thinking around development philosophies, trends, and helpful tools.

First off, we'll highlight a couple links by Don Dodge that we feel hit some of our points well:

• How Google Sets Goals

• Predictions 2010

And one more link that will come into play later:

• Pivotal Tracker

Dev Cycle:

A big item on our minds is rapid iterative development right now (after all, it's what our tool facilitates).  We employ an iterative development process, and getting a glimpse into Google's goal and dev structure was great to validate our approach.   To expound a bit on our approach it centers around rapid execution of well defined micro goals while still having flexible long range goals defined.

A good analogy for our approach would be to envision a mass of puzzle pieces on a table.  Pieces towards the left of the table are well defined and don't change shape/image much. Towards the other end, pieces along the right side of the table are amorphous and change shape/image constantly.  The left of the table is the current time period and the right of the table is the future.  The farther to the left the closer to present, the farther to the right, the farther into the future and the more amorphous the pieces and changing cycles of those pieces.  Our challenge is to put the right pieces into place just far enough ahead of time that they will fit well into the puzzle when the time comes to develop and to keep a constant eye on the pieces to the right and begin to lay them out as best we can.  The kicker is pieces are constantly being introduced to the right, but that's all part of the fun!

Trends:

It's very clear to most everyone at this point that mobile is the future.  We'll begin to see the gap between physical interaction and its accompanying digital interaction start to meld into one.  This, in our opinion, is the goal of all technology.  Implementations of technology, far too often, are short scoped and don't fit well into our overall lifestyle and tend to impede the natural human flow.  This all plays into our thinking as we continue to develop.

Project Management/Dev Tools

Demoing has gone through quite a few different management approaches to handling the flow of tasks that are involved in any startup.  We started w/ the simple e-mail/memory approach...bad idea.  This approach, being more manageable when our team was just two, non-the-less lead to quite a few miscommunications and goals lost on both ends.  We quickly implemented ProjectPier, the open source alternative to ActiveCollab.  Being similar to Basecamp, we were able to manage our development tasks in a collaborative manner.  This program still seemed more burdensum than helpful and thus was slowly acquiesced by the e-mail structure again.

We needed a program that fit well into our development approach, could co-exist with lazy human nature (i.e. - as simple as e-mail), and could actually help us get a better understanding of our velocity.

Enter Pivotal Tracker.  Being keyed in by our developer, Ben Greene, we implemented and have loved it ever since.  It brings in the functionality of a Basecamp with the agile, iterative PM style we needed for our project.  It's been working incredibly well and has helped us better understand and approach and set appropriate goals week after week.

In conclusion:

These three items are seen as deeply intertwined into the thinking, development, and projections of our team.  We hope these thoughts help you as you continue to build out your start-up!

Shoot us any comments/questions below and we will be sure to respond.

Continue Reading »

A week has passed since our pitch to Adam Marchick, Weston Gaddy, and Devesh Senapati of Bain Capital Ventures for dart boston's Capitalize. We here at demoing wanted to write a follow-up post with some of our thoughts on the experience.

We'd like to start off by thanking Cort Johnson, Jake Cacciapaglia, and the guys at Bain Capital Ventures for the opportunity to pitch.

Leading up to the pitch we received substantial amounts of insight, including meeting with the two individuals who had pitched on Capitalize previously: Shawn O'Connor & Kabir Hemrajani.  The Art of the Start was read, and video casts were watched.  With the deck completed, the preperation began with many hours of mental run-throughs and approximately 4 full run-throughs.  Mike Schroll, who was on a cruise during the lead-up to the pitch, arrived just in time to do a quick re-sync the day prior.

The venue for the pitch was held in Bain Capital Ventures' beautiful Cafeteria (the only area large enough to hold 50+ persons).  It was a great turnout featuring the best in Boston entrepreneurship.  We had the pleasure of meeting many of them both before and after.

The pitch went very well, with questions interleaved into our pitch from Bain.  It felt very casual, even with 50+ people in the room and a live webcast of the event.

So, some key takeaways include:

• Be relaxed: Everyone gets to this point in different ways, but it allows you to speak clearly and facilitates an amicable environment on both sides of the table.
• Be Honest:You can be pretty confident that they will ask a question that you may not have thought of, or have not fully addressed in your development.  If you are unsure, be honest in admitting you don't have the answer, be open to their input, and ask questions.
• Be Conversational: It's less about pitching and more about communicating your idea.
• Be Flexible: You have a script, but the faces of who you're communicating with should ultimately be your finalized script.  This takes a certain level of perceptiveness, but we augmented aspects of the pitch on the fly by what we were reading from the other side of the table.  This is really where 'be conversational' comes into play in a somewhat structured manner.

The video of the actual pitch is below if you'd like to watch the entire pitch w/ Q&A from the audience.

Hope this helps as you seek funding for your startup, and feel free to shoot us any questions or comments!

Additional writeup on the pitch:

• BostInnovation
• Greenhorn Connect

It's great to announce that  just this past Sunday demoing.com went into closed beta!  Demoing is creating THE place for online apps to test and promote their products.

It's been a long time coming.  The concept of demoing has gone through many iterations with improvements being made at each change.

As things progress, we'll keep you posted via demoing's twitter feed @demo_ing.

If you'd like to give the beta a try, send a message to beta@demoing.com and we'll be sure to get you in.

Below is a picture of just part of the ridiculousness that made the beta launch on Sunday possible.

A shot of one of the team member's office. 4 screens, 2 servers, one desktop, one laptop, and a fridge...

As the first post of Progress Innovation's blog, it seems fitting to give a short history of the company, its foundational values, and its goal as it develops.

Progress Innovation found its conception in the mind of Stephen Sprinkle, CEO, during his time at the University of Wyoming.  Seeing the vast potential of the continually evolving online space, Stephen began diligently pursuing potential opportunities.  This ultimately led him to Boston, MA.  Through work and study, the idea for demoing.com began to take shape.  He enlisted his original Co-Founder, AJ Raczkowski, and together they formed Progress Innovation, Inc. in February of 2008.

Our Core Values:

Mutually Progressive Innovation

PI seeks to not only create services that are innovative in and of themselves, but through these services we seek to help propel the innovation of our users.

True Living

PI seeks to create both internal and external ecosystems that would allow for individuals to truly live well balanced lives in every sense.

Growth

PI believes no one can remain stationary in their knowledge, understanding, and skills and still continue to innovate.  We strive to help both those involved in our projects, as well as those outside of our projects to grow in whatever respect they are meant to develop.

Our Goal:

As we build our first major service, demoing.com, we are excited about its potential, as well as the potential it creates for an innumerable number of other startups.  Ultimately, PI hopes to create a system within which perpetual and unobstructed innovation can occur.  It plans to do this with a total re-think of the corporate structure, which will result in a truly matched life-work environment.

We at PI look forward to providing you some of the most exciting new services of the coming decade!