Creately Blog

If you have been following us, you’d know by now that we focus a lot on being ‘easy’.  And if you’ve tried Creately, seen the video or gone through our list of features, you’ll know Creately is a feature-rich application. We have powerful features that are ahead of most other products in our market.

And yet, we only speak of easy. Not of our endless list of features. Why? because we believe all those features exist for the sole purpose of making the process of diagramming & design ‘easy’.

Easy does not stop at building an intuitive UI. It becomes ‘easy’ is when you consider what the user is trying to do and your application makes it easier for that goal to be achieved.

Lets take an example. Nick wants to redesign his office computer network. So he needs to

1. Map out the current network structure
2. Plan the future structure
3. Get the rest of the IT team involved, gather ideas and feedback
4. Get approvals
5. Implement the network
6. Maintain it over the next year and then again start planning for the next upgrade.

So when we mean easy, we look at the whole process.

Here, the diagram is the central artifact. A diagram is drawn in steps 1 and 2.  So we focus on making drawing network diagrams easy. Large number of nodes, typically belong in groups. So collapsible groups – Check.

Also the diagram is about a real situation. A situation rich with data and information that needs to be referred to over and over again.  So objects need to have attached data like IP addresses etc.  Check.

Involves a team, so collaboration is a must. Check.

Maintaining it over a period of time means frequent updates. Multiple revisions – Check.

Overall, small mistakes in planning cost a lot in hardware. So some simple validation to tell you when you run out of ports on your switches help in the planning stages. – Check.

That’s just a snapshot of how we think about a specific use case.  We start at drawing and from there we visit each step and evaluate how we can make that visually driven task easier and more intuitive.

With our KObject technology and a contextual UI, we are able to do this for many types of diagrams in different disciplines.

So now that we are nearing the public release of Creately, are we done? Not at all.

We’ll keep going up the use case ladder to higher order user goals that are centered around diagrams and visuals. And we will find ways to make things easy. That may mean complex functionality that shows only when its required, new KObjects or just a small amendment like a tooltip.

If we’ve learned one thing with Creately, is that ‘easy’ is not easy to do. But when you get it, it wins you die-hard fans. Fingers crossed!

@chandika

PS – Have any suggestions on how we can use KObject technology to help the work you do in your field easier? Write to us or suggestion it on our Community Support Site.

Image: spackletoe

To celebrate the launch of the new Creately Private Beta Release we’re running a little competition on Facebook where we’re giving away 3 full year subscriptions to the Premium Creately offering for Free.

How to Win

1) If you already have a Creately account – Login to https://creately.com, draw a diagram and save it anytime today. We will pick a diagram out of our Creately hat and send you a Free 1 year subscription to Creately.

2) If you don’t have a Creately account and password – Just sign up for Creately anytime today and stand a chance to win a Full year subscription to Creately. Remember to mention “Facebook” when signing up to improve your chances.

3) Already signed-up and waiting for your Beta – Simply leave us a comment on our Facebook event wall or leave a comment below – tell us what you’d like to use Creately for, what else you’d like to see in it, or anything amusing that will bring a smile to our Fans.

So get moving, the day’s almost up. Check out the competition on Facebook.

The Creately Team
Online Diagramming Just Got Easier

With the recent release of the new Pink Panther movie here in Australia we’ve started using code names for each of our Creately releases. It’s pure coincidence that we named this first release on the greatest cartoon panther ever!

The next version of Creately isn’t going to be pink but it is going to be just as great.

Here at the Creately R&D Labs we’ve been hard at work adding a range of new features to the Creately framework and improving the current KObject sets. Its taken a lot of hard work but the release is now being finalised and will be ready in the coming week.

We’re a Customer-Driven startup, and are committed to letting our users guide us in developing a better product. We’re so exciting about this release because for the first time we got to introduce features that real users have asked for. Thank you for all the feedback, star ratings and suggestions you’ve given us.

‘Nuff said – Here’s what’s headed your way this week.

• Brand New Toolbar – A sleek new toolbar that’ll give you more space for your drawing canvas.
• 1-click styling – KObjects can now be styled with beautiful backgrounds, borders and gradients at the click of a button. Beauty with ease.
• More Sharing Goodness – We heard you loud and clear. You’ll be able to publish your diagrams on a search engine friendly public URL with just 1-Click. Now clients and teammates can view and comment on your work without a login.
• Add your own images – Everyone wants to add their own images to their designs so we bring you the 1-Click image upload button.
• Comment, Share and Smarts – Now leave comments, share your work and configure KObjects in individual tabbed windows.
• Connectors – Connectors have been rewritten and are quicker and easier. We’ve got rid of those niggly issues and would love to hear your thoughts on this.
• Lines – Ever needed to draw free form lines that are not connectors? Now you can!
• Beautiful Curves – We’ve got beautiful new curved connectors and lines. Sexy!
• PDF Anyone? – Yes, now export your diagrams in Adobe PDF format for that professional finish as well as JPEG and PNG.
• Right-Click Menu – You asked for it so R&D got cracking on this problem to bring you a right click context menu. Tell us what you’d like in the right-click menu on our Support site.
• Powerful New KObjects – Creately’s getting smarter. More on this in a later post.
• Profile Management – View and update your Creately profile directly in the Creately application.
• Improved Star Rating Feedback Form – Brand new Ajax window to help make it easier for you to share your feedback.

This is just a quick teaser. We’ll give you a full run down when we release the next instalment of Creately this week. We’d love to hear your thoughts so swing by our Community Support Site to request a feature or provide us with your ideas.

@nick_foster

Image courtesy: www.maquilon.com

Just a quick blog post to tell you that you can now join us on Facebook to keep up to date with everything that we have going on here at Creately. Visit facebook.creately.com and become a Creately fan – to get the latest Creately updates in your newsfeed – just like you get all your friend’s status updates.

The Creately Facebook page contains feeds from this blog, our Community Support Site and other snippets of Creately news. We regularly update it with details of the most recent developments here at Creately.

@nick_foster

Image courtesy: www.facebook.com/facebook

Measuring business metrics is one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of running an early stage Internet startup. As a young startup looking to raise funds, we’re often quizzed on our financial figures and projections. It is often difficult to build out financial projections without a track record. So what should you do?

Although hard financial data is important, I believe we can often find great non-financial metrics that go a long way in assessing the true worth of a startup, for example the rate of user engagement or the satisfaction of the users. This tells us how a company or product is doing right now and can provide a good indication of the quality, passion and promise of the founders of the startup. Remember – An investor is never going to invest in a good idea without quality founders.

Key Performance Indicators

My interest in system performance metrics goes back to 2002 when I was the Performance & Capacity Manager at Lloyds TSB in the UK. I spent my time tracking performance information on Lloyds TSB’s server farms to compare it with the business unit’s future plans. This helped me work out which IT services and servers needed to be upgraded.

After working in Capacity Planning I know how important accurate technology and business metrics can be. Its a thankless job, because no one notices when nothing goes wrong. But all hell breaks loose when something does go wrong. This makes performance metrics one of the most important but under appreciated aspects of your business.

I keep talking about business metrics, when the right term is Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. KPIs are important as they allow us to understand our business and see how well its doing. To help us find the right KPIs, we categorized them into 2 distinct buckets:

1. Continuously measured – these are the largest group and change without the users directly providing measurable feedback. At Creately for example, we track data related to the total number of diagrams created.
2. Spot measured – these are recorded by directly asking the user a question or inviting him or her to do something on your site. At Creately we recently introduced the 1-click star rating feedback when a user logs out.

So we know KPIs are important and that we needed to measure them. But where do we find these KPIs? That’s easy. Every RIA and Internet startup has a database (probably many more) – start there. We looked at the data we’re producing and storing about the users and their activities on our site and service. Then we went further and looked into our servers and the data they were generating.

Where to start

I know that’s a lot of data to go through. But you can start small and build as you learn more about your business. Here are 6 questions we asked ourselves when we set out to measure our business performance :

1. Which data can help us build a better product or business?
2. What information gave us a better insight into our users’ behavior?
3. How do we collect information that will help us decide the product’s future feature set,
4. What is the value proposition of our start-up? If its ease of use, how can we measure that?
5. When are our systems down? Do we constantly monitor system availability?
6. What do we need to know to be a success!

Here’s a sneak peek into what we measure at Creately to give you an idea of what I mean:

• Number of Private Beta users and their usage patterns
• Number of diagrams created
• Number of collaborators associated with the diagrams
• Star Ratings submitted by users
• User traffic

This is just a sample of some of our KPIs at Creately. Think about your own situation to work out the KPIs that are right for you.

Historical Trends

Finally, we were sure to maintain historical records. If you don’t, by the time you want to look back you won’t have anything to look back at. Trends and growth rates are very important for planning the future of your Internet Startup and raising investments. They’re also a great way to track the progress you’re making and help keep everyone on the team motivated. In its simplest form you can setup a cron job with a script to record your KPIs once or twice a day (or whenever) and store them in a database for processing and comparison later.

Do let me know what KPIs you think should be measured for your or any Internet startup?

You can try Creately now

UPDATE: Since we put this post out, we’ve come across some great resources on measuring business performance and user adoption:

• @Andrew_Chen on OMG I’m just a startup, I can’t do those fancy analytics!
• @mixpanel on Stop guessing: A guide towards deciding your next feature

BTW if you’re interested in web metrics and what Internet search can tell us about ourselves please have a look at Bill Tancer’s book Click. I just finished an Advance Reading Copy and it is quite interesting – although it does drag in the middle. Bill works at Hitwise and knows what he’s talking about.

@nick_foster

Image courtesy: Leo Reynolds

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

Photo Credit: boltron