HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

Whilst in the throes of exploring my favorite airfare booking site (Hipmunk), I noticed their live chat tool looked a little… different. It was bouncy, fun, and unassuming. Turns out, they use Olark: by far the most impressive live chat tool I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with.

Olark is absolutely simple to integrate: a single snippet of JavaScript. But it offers a great deal of power: you can push a logged in user’s name and email address through the chat, and set their IP address, browser build, and other details as that user’s “status” when chatting. (You can even have the chat bot message you that information at the beginning of the session.)

The fun doesn’t end there: Olark allows you to actually redirect a user to a different URL, including external addresses, all while maintaining persistent chat. This is absolutely fantastic, as you can literally direct a user to the page they need while still helping them out. Olark reports what page they’re currently looking at, and their new co-browsing feature allows you to literally see what your users see, scroll the page for them, and circle certain elements.

This level of interaction is fantastic: it can help clinch a waffling pre-sale customer who has a small question but isn’t able to find an answer and doesn’t want to go through the trouble of filling out a contact form. Or it can assist with the on-boarding process: new users are the most likely to encounter experience-ruining burrs, problems, small barriers to entry that can be resolved with a simple chat.

The ability to transfer conversations, native Jabber/XMPP utilization (such that I can use Trillian for managing my chats), and a robust API round out the core features of a very compelling product. Olark is free for up to 20 conversations a month and one operator, but the clients we’ve signed up on Olark needed the Gold plan, since it’s the lowest plan that supports SSL.

Check out Olark for pre-sale potential customer engagement, and post-sale onboarding/getting started assistance. Reducing friction for new and potential users is the surest way to build a loyal following or make a sale.

Olark

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged with: olark

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Reviews

Off and Away is a neat travel bidding site that lets you bid on travel deals for pennies. (The bids cost roughly a buck, though.) Curious at how their timer was put together, biz-partner Bob took a peek at their JavaScript. Somewhat surprised to find that they hadn’t minified it, he was even more amused by their credit card function, aptly named $.fn.creditcard_shizzle.

When writing and testing code, it’s really tempting to put in junk data or in-jokes or other fun bits. As a development company, we’ve banned that outright, even in development environments, because we’ve discovered that somehow, some way, our little joke will end up live, released to clients or their customers, or even worse, appear in big bold letters in the middle of a demo. Nothing quite matches the sheer terror and stomach-pit feeling as having “stupid mcassface” show up during a demo.

Clearly, Off and Away’s devs/founders have a sense of humor and since this is source code and not customer-facing, this isn’t really a big deal. It’s not even vulgar. But it’s amusing to stumble across these sort of gems, as long as they’re not in the middle of a demo. For more fun, search swear words on Google’s Code Search. You’ll find some exasperated comments, angry rants, and outright bitterness, to be sure. (Hell, even Microsoft’s done it.)

Off and Away

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged with: code, comments, off and away

Posted in: Development

Google’s Plus release represents their first legitimate effort at a coherent social experience. Right out of the gate, they’ve got a few things incredibly right: amazing notifications unified throughout all Google products, good integration with Picasa and Android, Circles, Hangouts, data portability, and a feeling like this might be around for some time.

Now they need to focus on what’s necessary to make this a second nature, everyday product for people, like Facebook is now for most people.

Open Registrations/Invitations

If anyone can get scale right, it should be Google. Admittedly, scaling instantly in to the millions is a challenge for even the largest companies, and there’s surely a method to their madness here, but they need to be doing whatever they can to get this thing open to as many people as possible. They’re framing the current experience as a “Field Test”, but it’s difficult to test a social networking product if you can’t get your friends onto it. Early adopters are the type of user who will shift their more reluctant friends to a new system. They’re kneecapping their momentum with their limited invitations.

Figure Out Sparks

By far, the most confusing element of Plus is Sparks. It’s an interesting hodgepodge auto-aggregator of news and blog posts on individual topics (or “eccentric hobbies” as their video goes), but it’s presented in a bit of a sloppy way. Since it’s curated automatically, it’s not terribly great at it, which is a bit disappointing as well. Fortunately, Sparks is a nice-to-have within the Plus experience. Perhaps some integration with Reader would help make Sparks shine.

Make Huddles Amazing (Read: Copy Beluga)

I’ve got basically every single friend I speak with regularly on Beluga now. We use it to plan events, see what’s happening for the evening, and coordinate shared rides and the like. It’s a great tool. We also have fun with it. We share photos and links and such. And we can access it from our desktop if necessary. Huddles don’t currently let you access them from the Plus site itself, only from the mobile app. Since Plus isn’t available in the iPhone App Store yet, I can’t try to convert my friends to Huddles yet. And since Huddles don’t let us share photos or set Huddle photos, I don’t know if I’d want to yet. Location sharing is really useful too, and here Google has a definite leg up: it already shares location on posts… why not on huddle updates? Moreover, why not tie directly in to Latitude? Let me navigate right to a real-time-updating friend if I’m picking them up from someone, right from within our Huddle!

Import Profile Pics from… Somewhere!

Most of my connections/friends on Plus are faceless. Make adding a profile picture a required first step. It’s important to associate faces with names, but moreover, it’s WAY less usable to see a bunch of placeholder graphics throughout the product. Import from Gravatar, or, if you won’t violate TOS (heh), from Facebook directly. Either way, make it required, or constantly nag until it gets done.

Release a Stream Notifier or API

If you want us to engage, we need to know things are happening. Right now, it appears the only way to see new posts is to load up the Plus site or app and look at the Streams. Facebook and Twitter have apps or APIs that allow us to get pinged with updates as they happen. You’ll lose momentum and people will stop coming back to Plus if we can’t see what’s happening without having to call up the site manually every time.

Let Me Cross-Post Content Easily

Since Plus isn’t going to overtake Facebook, Twitter, or Linked In overnight, let me cross-post to those places with a click of a button. Better yet, blow everyone away and make it as easy as choosing a “Circle”. Add the Facebook “Circle” and the post auto-cross-posts there. Add the Twitter “Circle” and the shortened form is available for preview before it ends up there. By keeping up the walled garden, Google may be intentionally discouraging this sort of behavior, but this is what will trigger buy-in immediately and ease the transition. Social networks aren’t necessarily a zero-sum game, but two is likely very close to the limit for most.

What’s Next for Plus

Plus is off to a great start. Better than Buzz or Google Wave could ever hope for. It’s exciting, clean, original, and well-executed, with a lot of great features available right out of the gate, and some really innovative concepts. With a bit of polish and a bit more hand-holding, I think Google can convince people to begin using Plus as part of their daily interaction. But the elements needed to keep us checking in and coming back every day aren’t quite there yet. The notifications are a great start, but they only tell part of the story, keeping me informed only after I’ve already engaged. I need a reminder to check in on Plus and see that my friends are using it, and that’s sorely lacking right now.

Google also needs to integrate single-sign-on/Google Authentication with Plus, the way Facebook Connect can be used to allow people to log in or register on a site. It’s not necessary to have a complete app platform available right out of the gate, but Facebook is definitely on to something with Facebook Connect and it’s an important element for any social networking site to drive engagement.

Hopefully we’ll see swift continued development on Plus. It’s a great product out of the gate, but building the product isn’t the hard part in social networking: that’s left to getting users to buy in and keep coming back for more. Plus solves a lot of the qualms people have with Facebook on the privacy, data portability, account deletion, and sharing side of things, and that’s amazing. But it’s not an instant win, and they’ve got a long way to go. Making Huddles indispensible (and consider integrating them with group gTalk) would help, but I’m hoping they’ve got some other unique features up their sleeves to introduce into the Plus fold. I’m disappointed that the Slide-inside-Google-developed Pool Party and Prizes products weren’t built with Plus in mind. It might be time for the left hand to clue the right hand into what’s going on, and to get everyone on the same page.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged with: facebook, google, google plus, Social Networking, twitter

Posted in: Cool Stuff

HTMList primarily focuses on the technical side of the web development work we do here at Synapse Studios. We’re mixing things up a bit with the announcement of the launch of Nestablish.com, a comprehensive loan officer workflow management system, built as a startup for a few loan officers who wanted to make life easier for their fellow loan officers.

Loan officers frequently have to generate and sign pre-qualification forms and other specialty forms (such as Arizona’s Loan Status Update form) for each and every offer a real estate agent makes on a house. This can often come at inconvenient times, such as nights and weekends, when loan officers are typically off-the-clock. Nestablish allows loan officers to configure a maximum value for the pre-qualification documentation. The real estate agent is then granted the ability to generate the forms at the value they require, automatically limited to the maximum allowed by the loan officer.

This project presented a few interesting challenges for us, including working with the Fannie Mae 3.2 file specification to allow for the easy import of loan information into the system, and some complex PDF generation. Since each loan flows through a complex process with a lot of steps and required documents, we built Nestablish to allow the loan officer, real estate agent, and home buyer alike to track the progress on the loan approval and see exactly where they are in the process. This ensures faster closings with fewer back-and-forth during the typically-stressful home buying process.

We’re incredibly proud of our team here at Synapse who helped make Nestablish a reality, including Jeremy Lindblom, Andrew Reida, and Bob Eagan. We’ll be working with the fantastic team at Nestablish to deliver a whole new suite of features to the site very soon, but loan officers can get started today by registering for a free 60-day trial. (Nestablish is free for real estate agents and home buyers, and only $29.95 for loan officers after the free trial.)

Nestablish — Loan Workflow Management & Form Generation

Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged with: clients, launch, launching, nestablish, projects

Posted in: Announcements

As a web development firm, we frequently have to manage passwords and other credentials for multiple clients and their projects. This includes everything from SFTP and SSH information, database passwords, DNS managers, domain registrars, and everything else under the sun. We’ve moved to a policy of good password practice across the board at the urging of common sense, and one of our former developers, Alan Hogan. (Our previous system was not sharable, and wrought with other shortcomings.)

We needed a password system that was secure but which would allow us to share client passwords across our team, while ensuring limited access within the organization, and unique, complex passwords every single time. We ended up making use of the wonderful KeePass tool, synced through Dropbox.

KeePass is a wonderful password manager (though not as much for Mac or Linux users, for reasons I’ll get to) in general. And it has some pretty great features, some unique to KeePass, others relatively standard fare:

Read More »

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tagged with: best practices, dropbox, encryption, group passwords, keepass, password management, Security

Posted in: Cool Stuff, How To

Restaurant web sites are an interesting beast. It’s 2010. By now, nearly every restaurant realizes they need a web site. Unfortunately, a lot of owners still don’t quite understand what purpose their site serves or how to best serve their potential customers.

I’ll keep this simple:

1. Your full address, hours, and phone number should appear on EVERY SINGLE PAGE, please. Don’t make me hunt for this information, since this is what at least 90% of your visitors are hunting for. Jam it into a sidebar or footer, but do NOT make me click a separate link or search like a truffle pig for something so very basic.
2. Put a map on your contact page. Don’t just link to it, put the damn map there. This is extraordinarily simple, and full instructions are here, but suffice to say, enter your address on Google maps, click the Link option in the upper right corner, and copy and paste the embed code that appears. Don’t make me click through to see the map.
3. Stop using Flash. Just stop. Resist the urge. It doesn’t make you edgy. It annoys the hell out of me. And any of your users who are trying to pull your site up on their phones. You can accomplish cool image changing effects in other ways, and if you’re playing music, that needs to stop too. Save the ambiance for your restaurant. Flash is also exquisitely bad for search engine optimization; people searching for a specific dish or words and phrases that would otherwise appear on your site may not find them if the search engines have trouble grabbing them. They’ve gotten better at searching Flash, but it’s still nearly impossible to drop someone accurately to the right spot in your Flash movie, so it just frustrates people.
4. Make your full menu available. With prices. And incredibly prominently. The 10% of users who already know where you are and when you’re open are coming to check your menu. If you have several menus, list each of them. If they change often, that’s fine, but keep it seasonally representative at the very least.
5. Make your menu available in a manner other than PDF. I know this one is a toughy and it’s unlikely to be a change anyone adopts in the near future. Restaurant owners are busy people who barely have the time to update the menu in PDF form, which is how they get it printed, to worry about converting it to HTML or making it otherwise available on the site in a way that looks half decent. But doing this the right way is better for search engines, mobile users, and people who know that opening a PDF is a sometimes-Sisyphean ordeal that causes you to curse the gods. Don’t put us through that. We want to plan our meals or see if you have something we like. Make it easier on us.
6. Only show fantastic food photos. Pay a photographer to get it right if you must, but do NOT post cell phone pictures from your Blackberry that you took on the patio at 11pm. This reflects poorly on your presentation even if the dish looks fantastic in person, and there’s no need to give people a specific reason NOT to show up. Also, you need not over-emphasize photos. While fantastic photos can really help push someone the right direction, you don’t need to overwhelm them. This isn’t McDonalds. In any event, make sure they’re great quality photos: well-lit, not overly compressed, and of something appetizing and plated well.
7. Make sure you list things that set you apart. If you offer dietary considerations for diabetic, gluten-free, kosher, vegetarians, or vegan dieters, mention that. It’ll help in search engine results, and it’s invaluable for people who are looking specifically for that information and are unsure if you have anything that works for them. Consider whipping up an online menu that showcases some of those dishes; people in those communities will be extremely appreciative.
8. Give us a little personality. Clearly state your purpose, your passion, and what you do to deliver and set yourself apart. A simple explanation with a few well-written bits about how much you love making great food for people can get your visitors energized and ready to make a reservation.

These are pretty universal, simple to apply tips that can enhance the experience for visitors who need a very specific piece of information typically very quickly: don’t frustrate us by burying it, forgetting to supply it entirely, or by designing the site so horribly that it’s nearly closing time when we finally track down your hours.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Tagged with: design tips, food service, menus, restaurant sites, restaurants

Posted in: Design, How To

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tagged with: chat logs, mana, skype

Posted in: Cool Stuff

I recently bought a new house and found myself subscribed to West Elm, Crate and Barrel, and CB2′s email newsletters as a result. They offer some really good deals, showcase new and fun things for around the house, and they’re nice and pretty to look at. But these guys brutally violate the tenet of “not more than once a week, and even twice a month is pushing it” in the newsletter department, as their default behavior.

I get emailed sometimes as much as three times per week by Crate and Barrel. This is simply too much. The problem is, it’s all or nothing. While I may want to see when they announce new seasonal items or great upcoming sales, I can either turn it all off, or get barraged with an absurd amount of mail that drives me nuts.

The solution to this is to allow users to choose their newsletter frequency. Harry & David, another frequent emailer, wised up to this and offers four options:

• “Keep my emails coming, I want to make sure I receive your best offers”
• “Send me an email once a week”
• “Send me an email once every two weeks, plus holiday reminders”
• “Send me an email once each month, plus holiday reminders”

Brilliant. Since I’m not dying to be tempted by fresh and delicious pears four times a week, I chose the “once a month, plus holidays” option. I still see when new products are in season, and they warn me of upcoming sales, but I’m not driven to insanity, nor do I start to get frustrated with the brand because our email relationship is now on my terms.

Implementing variable frequency email newsletters, while sounding pretty simple, can be a bit complicated. An organization needs to determine if they want to tailor the less frequent emails differently so that users who are on the frequent list don’t receive the same email as users on the monthly list, or if they simply want to ratchet down the frequency. Typically, one would apply a simple hierarchy: the monthly email is the same for everyone, the bi-weekly is likewise, and people see the emails they’ve requested. If a weekly lines up with that month’s monthly, they’ll get that message, instead of a separate double.

I know that interactions and brand engagements like this rely on lots of “touches” to keep people thinking of you and to encourage repeat sales, but I really wonder about diminishing marginal returns. At the point that I’m receiving 10 emails from a company a month, how many more purchases can I reasonably be expected to make, versus sending me 5 emails a month? My personal feeling is that you seriously risk annoying your subscribers without making it back in increased purchases by polluting their inboxes and worse, conscribing yourself into “automatically delete” mode for the customer—since all they see is noise, they don’t even take the time to look inside anymore. When your emails are farther and fewer in between, and a good deal more substantial, your open rates increase and your conversion rates are likely to do the same… but even if they don’t, you won’t be risking damaging your brand, even on a subconscious level, with your best customers.

And your newsletter subscribers ARE some of your best customers—they’ve volunteered to allow you to spam them on a regular basis, for heaven’s sake. They trust that you’ll deliver value and deals and reasons to keep opening their messages. Don’t abuse that trust, and instead, let them set the boundaries so that you don’t unwittingly do more harm than good.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tagged with: cb2, crate and barrel, customer engagement, email newsletters, harry and david, marketing, newsletters, online marketing, west elm

Posted in: Rants

Continuing their trend of releasing substantial features and additional services in their web services portfolio on a regular basis, Amazon announced this week the availability of versioning and multi-factor authentication across their Simple Storage Service (S3) property.

How S3 Versioning Works
Versioning is a critical feature many developers had requested as data stored on S3, while maintained in triplicate across the S3 file-system automatically, is still vulnerable to sweeping delete operations by developers, errant scripts, or other causes. Moreover, developers had to manually version changing files if they wanted to preserve the ability to roll-back to an earlier revision or undo a “delete”. In any event, a lot of custom code had to be created to replicate these behaviors, and most solutions weren’t particularly graceful.

Read More »

Popularity: 16% [?]

Tagged with: amazon, amazon aws, amazon s3, deletions, mfa, versioning

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Development

While managing your social networking presence on Twitter and Facebook, it can be difficult to quantify the impact of each medium. While I’m a huge fan of Twitter, traffic results from earlier today on one of my sites confirmed for me what may sound like common sense: Facebook fans drive far more traffic per-user than Twitter followers for a given promotional message.

I’m currently running a contest in association with T-shirt company Threadless. (It’s called Threadknits, and it’s based on knitting and crocheting their t-shirt designs into crafts.) Today, Threadless posted a message on their Facebook page and  Twitter, both with essentially the same content: an invitation to check out Threadknits. They were both posted at nearly the same time.

The numbers are what might surprise you. Threadless has almost 1,500,000 followers on Twitter, and “only” 102,000 fans on Facebook. With the posts made within an hour of each other, my traffic on the site shot up, with a couple thousand visitors hitting by day’s end. Here’s the breakdown of traffic driven from each:

 
The difference is absolutely staggering. Whereas Facebook generated an approximate 1.08% clickthrough rate, Twitter’s was closer to, well, 0%. 232 visitors came from Twitter or related sites directly and 450 additional clicks landed on the home page without a referrer, which I’m chalking up to clicks from Twitter clients. (Though, to be fair, this could easily overstate Twitter’s influence.)

On a previous contest, Threadless would tweet and I’d see between 1,000-2,000 clicks on their roughly 1.4 million followers, so while it may be a bit low today, I think the point stands: Even at its best, Twitter for large audiences generates clickthrough rates dramatically lower than Facebook. For 2,000 clicks, the rate at 1.4M followers stood at 0.14%. A quick look at the bit.ly stats on a few links from Ashton Kutcher (the #1 Twitter personality by followers) shows they typically net about 20,000-30,000 clickthroughs, on 4.3M followers, gaining a decent amount on the Threadless best-case scenario all the way up to 0.48% ~ 0.60%. (This accounts somewhat for the viral nature of Twitter as bit.ly clicks are counted for retweets as well.) Naturally, clickthrough rates will vary dramatically even amongst popular Twitter personalities for a variety of reasons. I’d like to focus more on the significant difference between the Facebook and Twitter rates I witnessed today.

There are likely several possible reasons for this:

• The audience may be slightly different—people willing to consider themselves “fans” on Facebook may be more picky with their allegiance than those willing to follow an account on Twitter.
• The phrasing and formatting of the message were slightly different—not exactly apples-to-apples as Facebook includes the logo and a text clip from the website, but I imagine this had a negligible effect.
• My mileage may vary—this is an admittedly small sample size, but I think the evidence and logic around these results indicate they’re not anomalous.
• Most importantly, Facebook lingers while Twitter sails by. Users are probably more likely to follow links during their Facebook time than from a passing Twitter notification unless it’s of particular interest to them.

That last point is particularly important. Facebook, having reconfigured their News Feed yet again, no longer sorts things there chronologically. They’ve merged the Highlights functionality back into the News Feed which they now use to keep certain posts “stickier” than others based on what they believe you might be interested in. (It manages to do a strikingly horrible job at this compared to how it used to perform, but that’s a conversation for a different post.)

With Twitter, the very nature of real-time can be summed up: blink and you miss it. While you can use a Twitter client to review tweets over the past day or two, it’s still less likely your tweet was as visible over Twitter as a post would be on Facebook’s News Feed. I’d like to see some more statistics on total audience reach. The clickthrough rate surely only tells part of the story—I’d be far more interested to learn what percentage of each audience even saw the post, and determine true clickthrough rates from that.

In the end, it’s important to consider the overall spirit of the findings here. Twitter is great for growing virally and interacting with customers, but your message on Facebook may have a far more lasting impression and generate greater returns, even if fans are more of a fight to procure. Engage on both, but recognize the differences between them and leverage each of their strengths. I’ll likely post about the best way to do that for each site in the near future.

(The above graphic represents the total clickthrough breakdown by medium assuming a linear progression of Threadless’ Facebook audience to match their Twitter audience, maintaining the same clickthrough rates from today’s traffic. It’s likely the Facebook clickthrough rate could in fact fall some as their audience grew, but it’s my belief that it would still beat Twitter, user for user.)

Popularity: 17% [?]

Tagged with: analytics, clickthroughs, facebook, Social Networking, statistics, threadknits, threadless, twitter, viral

Posted in: Articles, Cool Stuff