posted28/03/09
In our efforts to drive conversations with our customers and garner quality feedback, we’ve added a new star ratings page to the Creately.com site. The feedback page appears after a user signs out of the Creately application. The idea behind it is to provide a quick and simple mechanism for users to provide us with feedback - hence the intentional simplicity of the form.
The Challenge
Getting reliable and honest feedback from the user of a web application is one of the hardest things to achieve. I’m sure everyone reading this has received emails from other services, possibly days after the event, asking for their feedback. These surveys suffer from very low response rates. There are many reasons for this. Often when a feedback email arrives in your mailbox, you simply can’t be bothered to change tasks and complete the survey so it’s forgotten about. Or you can’t accurately remember what happened during the event you are being quizzed about. We are trying to combat this survey fatigue and the delay in accessing the user’s experience by providing this simple star rating and feedback box as soon as the user signs out of the application.
Creately Star Ratings
Our star rating system also has several benefits for everyone. Its completely anonymous - so you can write what you honestly feel. And since the user’s star rating is recorded via AJAX as soon as it is chosen, it allows us to gather this basic feedback immediately without waiting for a user to complete and submit the form. This way we still have the star rating to provide us with guidance on our progress here at Creately, even if you get distracted and dont submit the form.
To see the new feedback for you can sign in to Creately, get your diagrams done and then just sign out. If you don’t yet have an account please sign up for a private beta account.
I would also be interested to hear your thoughts on what makes a good user feedback system. We have some more ideas and will be trying them over the coming weeks -keep your eyes peeled.
@nick_foster or @creately
posted26/03/09
Just went thru 10 Steps to Terrific Twittering - basically a boiled down version of all of @guykawasaki’s tips for Power twittering. As a young startup, we already practice many of these tips, but there were some that I had not truly appreciated the value of, until reading this post.
1) Follow your Followers
This is one of Guy’s commandments for Twitter. At Creately I wasn’t sure it that’s the way it should work for us. I had envisaged the @creately account to be used as a way to keep our beta users and interested parties up to date with new product features and updates. I wanted to let people find us online and follow us on Twitter, if they saw what they liked at creately.com. I very quickly found this approach works well with people who’ve heard about Creately and found us online, but did not allow us to reach out to the millions of technology early adopters who live in the TwitterSphere - which is really what Guy believes it can do for your brand. I felt I had made an implicit social contract with my @creately followers not to bombard them with the slew of twits or twitter activity that it takes to build a Follower base. But I needed to do more on Twitter.
It became clear that Creately needed more than one account to manage our conversations and marketing efforts on Twitter (more on our Twitter experience here) which leads nicely to my next point.
Tip - We use SocialToo and TweetLater to keep track of our followers, unfollowers and set-up auto-follows.
2) Use the right tools
There’s a lot you can do these days with the vast number of services and tools that have sprouted around the Twitter API. For us, managing multiple accounts and keeping track of user interest in our market (read ‘keywords’) was an important issue. I tried a slew of tools - TwitterFox, TweetDeck, Twirl, Destroy Twitter and services - Twitter Search (love the RSS), Twitscoop, TweetSuite, Splitweet, Social Mention (just to name a few)- gaining experience along the way and moving to more sophisticated tools as required. Start experimenting small to understand what Twitter can offer then decide what you want your Twitter presence to deliver and select the right tools based on your strategy.
Check this great list of all Twitter apps and tools on the Twitter Fan page on pbwiki.
3) Squeeze the Trigger
As Guy puts its - and I concur, how long do we want to wait before we decide its acceptable to direct market on Twitter. I think its time - as long as its done in a personable way and is not spam. Even if you think its Ok to engage with potential customers in this way, how do you go about doing it? Should I engage with Twitters who are discussing diagrams and mockups? Should I monitor conversations on competitors and try to reel new users in? These are issues of business ethics that will finally reflect on your company’s values and need serious consideration.
Personally I would take a cautious approach to direct marketing and definitely not use the @creately account for fear of alienating my current followers. Perhaps @diagramHelper would be a good moniker.
4) Make it easy to share.
This is a very important enabler if you want to see results on Twitter- remember the power that is inherent in the crowd. I won’t discuss this much here for fear of letting too much slip out - but watch this space.
Let me know what works for your startup. Back to Twitter!
@charanjit
posted14/03/09
The question of how we can help our users draw beautiful diagrams often comes up here at Creately. During a usability discussion, when the issue of our color palette came up, we realized that while the palette does have a whole bunch of colors, most of them don’t look good when applied on your designs.
To my surprise, our enthusiastic team come up with a cool color palette in a day to enhance the whole experience on Creately! The new color palette has a lesser number of colors yet makes your diagrams and designs look much nicer. Thanks to the subtle color tones.
Each row of the color palette (expect for first two ) have the same colors with different saturation levels. I personally love the 3rd and 4th which have light elegant colors. A trick you can use when applying colors is to choose colors from the same row on the pallet which will make your diagram look lovely.
So I put it to test on my clown drawing ;-). Have a look…
Stay tuned for some cool styling features in the upcoming releases, which will help improve the look of your entire diagram with just a few clicks.
