Should Products Ensure Developer Happiness?

Over the past while, I’ve been fully immersed these days into figuring out how to build Marvin.  In doing so, I’ve been researching products, services, or even technology that would help me do it. While diving into each one and evaluating whether to proceed in using them, I’ve found myself looking for the very same thing in each one.  That is, are they working to ensure their developers are happy?  Would I be happy working with them?

One of the biggest gaps that I’ve been looking to fill is the financial transactional information.  To do that, I’ve been evaluating Plaid, Xignite, Yodlee, and Finicity.  All are very capable and established services.  However, of the 4 services, Plaid is the only one that makes me feel that they care about developers. They have a healthy set of SDKs, great documentation, and their dev portal is welcoming.

Companies from all over are beefing up their engineering and development teams.  In many of those technology focused companies, the decision makers are those who are working directly with the product or service, the developers.  Developers normally choose the product that is the most effective at helping them achieve their goals.  Many products today continue to focus on selling to the business minded person, focusing on the features and pricing.  While that is certainly not a bad strategy, they tend to completely avoid the developers who would be working with the product or service.

I believe we are reaching the tipping point where you need to appealing to developers and their happiness in order to succeed. Many products brand themselves as a platform, normally with some externally facing API.  Those that don’t have an API likely have it near the top of their roadmap.  The API can serve multiple purposes: to bring a richer experience, to share data with other tools, or to build new functionality which isn’t supported within the parameters of the service. The market is flooded with technology companies, each trying to cater to a niche. While that company is using your product or service, their goals may be different, which is why they look for API access to enable them to perform their own business logic.

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Great design and user experience for smiles

I’m taking a bit of a break from writing my contextual series to address a few crucial problems that I’ve been seeing on a daily basis. That is the lack of a good user experience. On any given day, I visit close to 50 different sites and use over a dozen apps.  Of those I would say that 75% of them I would not visit or use if they had decent competitors.  The biggest problems with sites and apps these days is that they like to bombard the users with information.  I get that you want to make money from your ads, but displaying them elegantly will yield better results.  Design is also crucial, these days the simple look works and it looks great.

I’ve built my site around the same principles that I talk about. Yes my blog has ads, but I in no way try to distract my readers from the content. I push users to signing up to my newsletter in a box that appears in the top right. That box is set only to be seen once a week.  As for the look and feel, I kept things simple with no fancy logos, gradients, etc. While I may not get a huge amount of traffic, I am sure this design and approach could be used with great success from more popular bloggers.

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Contextual Series: Gathering User Information

This is the third part of my contextual series which will focus on a few technical details on how to gather user information.  I cannot stress this enough, be wary of the user’s privacy.  Make sure that anything you do is covered under your privacy policy and that the data you gather is done with the user’s consent.  As soon as a user considers their experience with your product as being creepy, you have lost the user.

Social networks like Facebook provide us with a wealth of data.  Social networks are a great way to get a user to consent to data without having to get them to fill in forms.  The information these social networks provide to you are bound by terms of service, terms of user and of course a privacy policy. Make sure you keep these in mind while thinking of ways you can use the data.

Before considering social networks as your primary source for data, keep in mind that with the modern web and native applications, your product may already have access to a lot of data that may be useful to you, especially regarding the user’s location. More specific information on a user, like age and gender will require input methods. If the user’s social connections are important to your product or you don’t want to submit users to numerous input fields social networks would be important.

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Contextual Series: User Engagement

In the second part of the contextual series, I will be continuing from where I left off last time with User Onboarding. I’ll be covering how to make your application relevant after the user has gotten past their initial experience.  The goal is to engage with the user in a way that will retain them and have them spend money.

The first few minutes of the user trying your product is crucial. In that short period of time they will decide whether they will uninstall it and move on or keep trying it out. But the next 30 minutes are also just as important. Like a drug, you want the user hooked to your product, you want them to feel as though they are dependant of it.  The most common way products get you addicted is through social engineering by getting you to engage with people you know. While it is something I would recommend each product would do, the product should be able to stand on it’s own even if the user has no friends.

Let’s assume that your product is capable of tracking a lot of data, including basic user profiles to narrow down their demographics and activity history. The data can be used to improve your analytics, determine business logic, and can be used to feed into your contextual engines.

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Forget marketing if you cannot provide unparalleled support

2013 has been a year where my brand loyalty has gone out the window. A lot of the products and services I used to love have lost me as a customer and a supporter.  Why?  Because I’ve experience poor support.  There were also certain scenarios where I chose to buy a competitive product or service to the one I was considering because their sales and support team made me feel welcome.

This is certainly not a new theory by any means. Companies are hiring agents to man their Twitter and Facebook channels for users complaining.   Having been on both sides of the coin, it isn’t an easy.  As a user, you are frustrated that you aren’t getting what you expected, whether or not expectations are reasonable.  With sometimes unreasonable users, providing may sometimes feel like a lost cause. Let me tell you that it is not, I will share my GoDaddy experiences later.

There are companies that I have been very loyal to over the past 10 years. I’ve praised their product, chanted their name and also showed my support with my wallet.  I’ve also supported brands in general, regardless of the product they released.  When something doesn’t work as expected or breaks, support is the first line of contact. Some bend over backwards trying to make you feel comfortable, even if you are wrong. Then there are others who feel like they just read you an answer from a manual without care of you moving on.  This year, my worst experiences have all been with services, namely Lunarpages, GoDaddy and Spotify.

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