Brainfight's Blog

How to use Popup domination, aweber or mailchimp for mailing

what all these names ? it’s email marketing tools. to create mailing list and campaigns and send your crap to your visitor. I m not very fond of these tools but I don’t want to spam them, I want to notify them, and it is all the difference.
from some friends and contact, I have been recommanded 2 tools to power the mailing list :

http://www.aweber.com or http://www.mailchimp.com

I selected mailchimp, because the monkey was fun :) , it is not only the reason, there is a free plan, and I have heard of a bug with aweber concerning the post and validation message to be in english only, which will not be suitable with my users database. Also because they have a free app for iPhone and the trend of popularity of their service seem to be pretty good

If you check at the popularity of the 2 services with Alexa

In order to get new subscribers or notify existing customers, I choosed this plugin for wordpress :

Popup Domination plugin which is supposed to work well with wordpress and compatible with either aweber or chimpmail as a backend.

stay tuned, you should see the popup to try it in a few seconds if you didn’t see it already

what is UX – User eXperience – definition and practice

What is UX ( User exPerience ) ? what is the gain, how it works ? what it is covering ?
User eXperience is the term to define how the user of a product or service will feel about the experience to discover, understand, choose, buy and use the product or service of a company.
Everyone is concerned, and feel it as customers, a visitor, a buyer.
the purpose is to “fix” or improve each parts of the whole process to make the experience of the user as positive as possible. but it is subjective, as it may depends on each persons. nevertheless, the art of the User eXperience is to maximize the quality of the user, by both collecting feedback from the users, and offering the best practice.
Imagine a customer in a shop, he find a product filling his need, expectation and just look about how to pay it, but the registers are hidden in the corner of the shop. Do you think he will be happy, will it give up the process, buy or not ?
if he succeed to buy, will it affect his opinion about the shop ?
Buying process is only one sample and one step of a process, but do you know only 20% of the willing purchase process are completed online ?
Why ? it may be because of the buy button isn’t visible, because the purchaser is hesitating, and doesn’t have the confidence in your web site ( we consider he has really decided to buy this exact product ).
With the same product, 2 different web sites may offer a different User eXperience, it can be because of the price, the payment method ( imagine you don’t accept the american express ), the easyness to register a new account, the easyness of the way to remember your account information ( recurrent purchase ), the incentive and special offers you may add and which can confuse the user if they need to make another choice.

there are so many little steps which can make a difference. each step , each details can play on 3% of the decision to continue or not. it is not critical, but if you multiply this small lost on each sales, you will quickly understand about how a UX expert ( the guy which will help you to build a better UX offer ) will make great return over investment on it.

How it works ? that’s the nice part, you have absolutely nothing to prepare on your side, the less information you give, the best return and benefit you will get. Simply give the web site, or address of your real shop, and the UX expert will do both a testing and a review of the process.
The UX testing part is here to check how it works , what part are easy to use, and which one require additional information, or update to be suitable to the current standards.
Once he will do the full experience of the product usage, or product purchase, he will provide a list of things to improve. At this step you can continue alone to fix the problems, and submit a new validation with the same expert or another. Or.. you can work with the UX consultant to improve each part. It’s where ergonomics and design could be consider as tools used by the Usability eXperience experts.

- Could be a new position of information – new layout

- Using different words ( call to action optimization ), it can be as well for the purchase process, as well the product name, or how the user could consider your company from the words and values you promote.

- Create and define the brand. That’s the long term strategy any company should define, but I consider this part more specialized, even if the user experience needs to fit your company values ( … so it means you need to have define company values ). If you promote easyness with a complicated shopping cart.. it won’t let you have the best conversion ratio ( the amount of sales completed over the number of visits )

I can help you to discover all the other aspects of the user experience, just let a comment or contact me, don’t tell me about your problems or what you will like to improve, it is my job to find that, send me your web site link, and an email, and I will return you a link to a video with my live experience of your service, and where I m hesitating, where I m lost, or where I will be convinced to not purchase your service.

Limited offer : Free Neuromarketing webinar

About 6 months ago, I was lucky enough to be accepted in a Stanford Graduate School of Business entitled “Strategic Marketing Management” ( aka SMM ). One of the key subject was Neuromarketing, something I was sensitive already, as I was interested into NLP ( Neuro Linguistic programming ), but NeuroMarketing was getting straight to the point or very simple rules, which is changing your mind, and make you communicate, market, sell, or even create products and service a better way. I would like so much to share my mind with all the samples and all the actions and experience I ran since the last 6 months, and I need to thank again Baba Shiv and all the others faculties I have met ( and the participants )

Funny facts are my consulting company is named “brainfight”.. and the new company name is ObviousIdea, but in a contest where I received 1226 logos, the final winner was a logo with .. a brain.

You can watch a screencast I did  about how people behave to a choice of 8 selected logos, and how to select a logo ( in french sorry )

Today I received an email from a neuromarketing specialist, in exchange of a 5 minutes survey about your Twitter habits, you can watch a 1-hour webinar about Neuromarketing, and the basics rules which could turn your marketing skills and results to the next level. The webinar you will be able to watch is awesome, it is really a nice summary of the Neuromarketing secrets, and even with extensive class about it, I enjoyed the video at lot. If you understand it, you would be able to say too, it can definitly influence your mindset about how to communicate and market your products.

Fill the survey and watch the free webinar

Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts about the topic

How to design a logo – real case study for Light Image Reziser

The identity of a product starts with his logo, but for a software, it will be daily seen by the users as a .ico icon on their desktop. for this case, it is a software for Windows, which will impact a little bit the choice of the design

The software name is “Light Image Resizer”, a PC program to resize photos and pictures. The light could be interpreted as not-very-powerfull, but easy, but I opt in for that risk. Also “light” is making sense for the photo market, as the photo is the art of using lights :-).
Finally it can remind of LightRoom from Adobe, without being used by popular competitors such as VSO Image Resizer, or PowerToys Image Resizer for Windows, Mihov image resizer

Before entering in deeper analysis of the choice of the design, let’s expose the current variation of the logo, there are 8 differents ones, which is too much, but it is also a way to show why you shouldn’t put too much different ones.
Despite there are 8 choices, it is all from the same graphic designer ( Fred from Beasty Design )

Vote now on http://twtpoll.com/i8dq1a

Here is coming the common mistake, you need to make sure the logo has the same size , at least in this case, they are all fitting a square of 96×96, it is very important. Of course, you will learn from the experience the only fact to have a vivid logo, will make it more visible to your user panel.

Don’t forget the past

if it is NOT a new product or version, don’t forget to include the past logo, so whatever the users voting are new or already know the product, it will be interesting to let them compare to the old logo. If the old logo still win, and the % of users voting is a majority of the past product. You will have to consider to keep the old one. And think about why you would really need to change the logo.

Take care of the layout

If it is technically possible, make the voting sheet elements perfectly even and numbered. here we have 2 lines and 4 columns, so there is always a doubt about the numbering ( I would prefer a flat single line or column layout, but it is not technically easy with the width of the article.
If someone say the number 2, which one it will be ?
so the suggestion is really to put a number clearly visible for each logo, so whatever the way they will see them, they could refer to the same logo. If you forget this detail , you will waste an incredible amount of time, as people will say, I prefer the blue one with the arrow, and you won’t be sure at 100% about which one is referred.

The art to ask the question

Now, My public question will be :

Which draft desktop icon you will prefer for Light Image Resizer software for Windows ?

I mention the kind of product it is, the draft status, and the name of the product which could influence their choice, and create a link between the name of the product and the logo itself.

I edited the poll and the question using TwtPoll, so you can easily post the poll wherever you want.

http://twtpoll.com/i8dq1a

Don’t think about it when you will vote, just select the one you see the most, and you prefer, without thinking about details.

that’s the real fast and basic recommandation to get feedback from users, in another method we will discuss the thumb up & down methods to choose the final version.

Get customers Feedback Uservoice vs GetSatisfaction vs UserEcho ?

The successful companies engage their customers, not only to satisfy them but also to define the priorities of their product or service developments.
It’s a must have service you need to include ( I was about to say “consider” but you definitely need to install one of them ).
I can’t share my own feedback about these products as I didn’t get the time while I was at VSO-Software to review or try them, and we were doing our customers relationship with instant messaging, private forums, and the public forum. I have been lucky to meet the CEO of UserVoice in San Francisco in a private meeting, they have been nice to share their view in this incredible market, but unfortunately my current customers weren’t very motivated to set up these kind of tools ( despite their huge audience and traffic )

You can see this with a side button “feedback”, using rollover layout ( which makes the solution very easy to be integrated to your web site )

Uservoice.com
GetSatisfaction.com
UserEcho.com

These companies help to let your users list ( and even define ) what features they would like to be integrated. They can vote for a limited number of items, so they need to make their wish list carefully. In the same time, it allows to communicate indirectly on what you will do next.

If you need a specialized service for support purpose, like chatting and getting live screenshot of the web service, I could recommend this one :

http://www.snapengage.com/

It is both a platform to chat with your customers, but also to get easily screenshots of their page to assist them or to review web bugs in case of an internal test version of a new web site.

If you know more services which deserve to be listed, please contact me or let a comment.

I still wonder why some companies choose to ignore these tools, maybe I can see 5 Reasons :

- They don’t know it exists ( well, they probably don’t surf a much outside their own web site )
- They don’t think they need a user-centric strategy ( what a mistake and I will explain why )
- They can’t absorb the number of feedbacks ( lack of resources to manage it, follow the suggestions ), it’s true it could be a valid reason to ignore these tools as it will just show to the users you are not that active.
- They have already define a product roadmap, which will make them busy for more than 6 months… indeed, another pretty good reason to not include such a tool.

A customer-oriented strategy is for me very important, because the final purpose is not only to make some people happy to be sure they will promote themself your service, but also to save time and not ignore some basic features you would have missed. If you expect the customers or users to email to your support, yes.. it happens but not that much, because people are lazy and used to not get a satisfying reply from the technical support ( another good subject for a post ), whatever we could measure the speed or quality of the reply, so users have been discouraged to report feedback as soon as they need to write down and send information which have no chance to be public.
These Feedback/forum platform engage users to vote quickly in a list defined by either the users themselves or a list of pending features defined by the hosting company project managers.

**** This article isn’t still finished. I would like to add screenshot of the applet for each of the top services, and a forum screenshot ***
** I found this new tool which sounds promising too :
http://www.marginize.com/
I discovered it on this web site : http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/34265/Sleepless-In-Startupville-23-Questions-That-Keep-Entrepreneurs-Up.aspx

VSO release Blu-Ray Converter Ultimate Preview

A new product from VSO is available on their download server, the software is VSO Blu-Ray Converter Ultimate , as the name is suggesting it is a video converter for Blu-ray ( from Blu-ray to another format ) but no information, product page or price is available ( despite it is not a freeware as there is a reminder screen when you execute the product  ( see screenshot at the end of the post )

Download VSO Blu-ray Converter Ultimate

First of all, you won’t be able to backup any protected Blu-ray without the help of another software, which makes the product quite difficult to use without basic knowledge of the video converting rules with protected disc

You can still download the free edition of DVDFab Passkey which removes the protection of DVD or Blu-ray disc as a driver ( you just need to reboot to make sure the installation is completed ). The leading software to remove protection is still AnyDVD HD

I have tested only a few minutes the new VSO products, it is not ready, plenty of problems with default value, interface looking bad, childish, too contrasted ( but it is due to the new developper in place now ) , and the conversion just doesn’t start. The reader / writer aren’t selected by default when there is only one. The message about the lack of support for decryption doesn’t help new users to know what to do next.
The Buy link go to the typical web page to buy products, but without the product listed. so it is just not possible to buy even if you would like !

You can discuss about the products in the vso’s forum