We're trying something new with support. We want to make it easier for you to show us any problems you're experiencing via Screencast, because sometimes it's better to show what's going on than to put your question into words.
About the new service
The new service uses Screenr for Business. You may be familiar with Screenr, the web-based service that allows you to do instant screencasts via your web browser. It's the same service, but when you record a screencast, the video gets sent to us and we respond to you directly via email to answer your question or resolve your problem.
How to record a screencast
To use this new service, head to our Support page here on Balsamiq.com, and look for the "Record a Screencast" button, then follow these steps:
1. Click the Record a Screencast button and an app will load in the background. A dialog will ask you if you want to load the app. Click Allow.
2. The app loads a frame over your screen. Drag the gray "How to record" box in the center to position the frame for your screencast. You can use the handles in the corner to resize the frame. When you're ready, click the red Record button.
3. Bring your Mockups app (or myBalsamiq, or any of the plugins) to the front of your screen and position the recording to capture your problem. Click the Record button.
4. Now ask your question. If your question is related to a bug, go through the steps that are causing any problems and talk through the problem, telling us what you're trying to do. When you're finished, click the Done button.
5. Enter your name and email address, a subject, and description for your question, and click the Upload button. The video will upload. Leave the dialog open while it uploads in the background and you can return to what you were doing.
That's all. Give it a try the next time you have a question that you'd like to show us. We'll get back to you by email after we've watched the video.
This week we quietly relaunched balsamiq.com, overhauling and re-tuning the site to align with our new priorities as a growing company. On the surface it may not seem like a huge effort, but it was challenging.
I'll run down the goals of this project, and talk through some of the steps we took to make it happen, in the interest of sharing what we learned.
Defining the Project Goals
When I came on board, Peldi expressed the need to look at the web site and learn how we can help make it easier for our customers to accomplish a few key tasks. Peldi's blog talks a bit about how we're slowly growing the company, and over the last two years as the site has grown both deep and wide, finding things has become harder.
Our high-level goals were to focus on information architecture and findability, with a little effort to smooth out rough edges. From the top, here were the priorities we thought the new site needed to focus on:
For Current Customers
- Make the update process simpler and the badge/button easier to find
- Provide clear paths to support materials, e.g. documentation, updates
- Simplify the site navigation and reduce verbose copy on very long pages
- Make the documentation navigable
For Prospective Customers
- Introduce customers to the company and reassure them of our mission--we compete on usability and customer service
- Provide clear, no hassle path to try the product right now
- Cut redundant content, get to the point about what our products are
- Provide clear call to action--aka make the button bigger and redder ;)
- Simplify the buy process
For Us
- Tell the story of our growing family
- Make it easier to maintain content
- Centralize frequently used elements
- Emphasize the voice established by Peldi and bring in the entire family
Planning Our Design
Overhauling is the right word to describe what we did here. If you've ever had a car or bicycle overhauled you know that it's a process of systematically taking something apart to examine it, look for things that need repair, and putting it back together so that it runs as good as new or better. That's what I had in mind for us to do.
I started, as many of us do, doing both top down and bottom up activities to define the problems. The top down was defining the goals and planning the navigation to suit. The bottom up was the nitty gritty of taking inventory of the original site. The goal was to get an idea of what content and services we were providing and see what entry points we provide.
The screen below shows my initial content inventory and a flow chart Peldi did for the new single Buy page.
Before the content inventory, I also started observing the points of pain by talking to customers. I started doing customer support with Balsamiq on day 1. This was and continues to be the biggest factor in helping me understand what we need to improve with the Balsamiq user experience. I learned about what blocked people at the point of purchase, getting software updated, and getting help or requesting features using the product daily.
In the first few months, we handled some of the quick fixes. We had issues with people finding out how to update the software, so we provided a simple link in the app, and a download link in the site header. We did that immediately. The next phase was tackling the bigger usability issues, e.g. providing an information architecture that suited customer needs better, and providing a cleaner purchase experience. We built an outline of a new IA and started mocking up.
Finding Our Story
The next step, and the hardest for me, is finding the right design. Being a design director is perhaps similar to being director of a film. Given a premise and story, you set out to develop the vision for how the story will be portrayed, you gather the actors and crew and creative team, and you provide the schematics for execution. That's a simplified analogy, of course.
All the practical work of serving needs being hashed out, we had to find a way to respect the history and personality of the original site and make it represent the new us, now that we were company of 6 (+2). On our small scale, it meant meeting with the entire company on our retreat and learning what our story was, talking with everyone to develop a concept that depicted that story, and then telling it with this site.
There were things I didn't want to change about the original site because they represented a key element about why I wanted to be a part of this small company. The thing that I found to be pretty awesome about Peldi's design of Balsamiq.com was the voice. You can still see it in the informal screencasts Peldi does. It's like he's actually sitting next to you showing you the software. Some may find the quality of the recording rough, but I like it because it's natural and friendly, and keeping that informal delivery means we can be ourselves and do screencasts more frequently and directly. That's the way we do support--we engage people directly and try to be as approachable as possible. That voice carries through the site, and wanted to be sure that we retained it.
I wanted to focus on this idea of the company as a corner bistro--like a small family restaurant. I was introduced to this idea of the "little Italian restaurant on the web" after reading an interview with Peldi on 37signals. The idea came from David Heinemeier Hansson, who refers to this idea of being the little business you returned to because you know the owners, and you prefer the quality of what they produce. That's what kind of set the tone for how to write the copy to reflect the new us that was still part of the voice that Peldi brought to the site originally.
If I were a journalist, this would be like researching a story and finding and writing the lede. The lede sets the tone for the rest of the article.
I focussed on 2 stories that I wanted to set the tone for the site:
1. The first story is about the company.
Peldi emphasized that we should communicate as much about who we were and what we stood for as it did about the product. I didn't get that immediately, but I see the value in making that a priority. There were a few messages about the company that I wanted to communicate and they're sprinkled throughout. The first bit is sort of a mission. We compete on usability and customer service. We're essentially a small company that cares about what we do, and who we serve.
This lead to the message on the front page, "Balsamiq is a small group of passionate individuals who believe work should be fun and that life is too short for bad software." On the company page we tell the story a little more deeply.
This story also lead to us using customer quotes and testimonials liberally throughout the site. We exist because of our customers--people who want to use our software and work with us to improve it--and we want to acknowledge that the continued success depends on that relationship, and we'll do everything we can to nurture it.
2. The second story is about the product.
The story about Mockups is very simple actually. It's made for frictionless ideation and iteration that everyone can participate in, and the low-fidelity sketch-style wireframes they produce keep you focussed on functionality. There's a secondary story that will be told with myBalsamiq, but the first two points are the main ones to communicate, and we wanted to do that with a few sketch-note style graphics, and to continue to use our simple screencast and web demo. I think this is communicated efficiently on the home page, and slightly more in depth on the product pages, where we preview screenshots and sample deliverables.
Mocking up Screens
The biggest factor in helping us get our ideas out, and selecting and refining them, is that we used myBalsamiq, our web version of Mockups that's in beta, to iterate on wireframes. We created mockups, commented on each version, and Peldi and I iterated in the app.
The screen below shows the Balsamiq.com project in myBalsamiq, with all the versioned artifacts of our planning and design process.
We do iterations fast, we keep the wireframes simple, and get far enough to find the right solution that we agree on. From there I could start working on building the real thing. We only modeled a few pages before going on to design.
One cool thing about using myBalsamiq is that we are also able to figure out which features we need in the app and can work designing those to help our process. One of those ideas, for example is creating mockup revisions based on what came out of comments and finding way to develop a feature around that.
Visual Design
With wireframes in place, it was time to start on visual design. With our IA and priorities in mind, I started sketching some concepts. Those are the sketches you see on the bottom left. Then I reflected on the company retreat we had, I started to get a pretty good idea of what I wanted to convey visually.
The stories above are really what helped me find a concept for the visual design. I don't consider myself a visual designer as much as I do an interface designer, but I think I represented this idea of who we were as a company.
From these sketches I began to explore some visual concepts in Photoshop and created visual design comprehensives. I needed a way to share the visual design comps I was working on so that we could critique and review those and I could continue to refine them with feedback. I used the image component in Mockups to post comps that we reviewed in myBalsamiq.
Below are comps for the home page and company page at different points in our design review.
View full size: Home Page Comp or Company Page Comp
Several iterations later and we had agreement on the visual design concept. I got to work developing the site.
WordPress as a CMS
We decided to use WordPress to settle on a single system to publish both our static content on the main site and our blogs. We really didn't have too much content to migrate on the main site, but what we did have, were a lot of Drupal nodes that needed some cleaner HTML and layout and typography stylesheets that we could evolve over time. We chose to host our own WordPress for the main site, and run our blogs on WP Engine.
For the main site we're creating pages with parent-child relationships to create the navigation. We have some custom PHP in our templates to handle the global and local navigation. We're relying on SuperCache to serve cached content and WP Minify to compress scripts and stylesheets. There aren't major modifications that we made to WordPress, besides using custom fields to handle discrete modules of content and output them into different areas of our templates.
We also use the BluePrint CSS Framework for layout, and TypeKit for rendering headings in Myriad Pro, our house font. We discovered, as many people seem to have, that a bug in pre-iOS 4 Safari (e.g. iPads) crashes that browser when serving multiple font weights and styles. That's one issue I am still looking for a resolution for. TypeKit is awesome, otherwise.
We did need to tune our server a little. We had a nice spike in traffic when Hacker News picked up our relaunch. Luis, with the usual quick response from Slicehost (thanks, guys!) helped get us get configured perfectly for our needs.
WP Engine for WordPress Blogs
Migrating WordPress blogs to WP Engine was a simple decision for us. The guys at WP Engine are awesome, and they had a solution for multi-site WordPress hosting that took the hassle out of us having to keep WP up to date. Takes the worry out of handling traffic and performance issues on our main server, they can serve all of our images from a CDN, and provide support for keeping the blogs up and running, so we can focus on just communicating and working on our product. They even helped us figure out some of the issues we caused with our 301 redirects that were interfering with image rendering. Good stuff.
Testing and Checking Copy
I took most of the existing copy on the old site, and copyedited it to fit with the new combined founder and company voice. I then created some copy in other parts that were consistent with this. Peldi did several rounds of copyediting from there and we iterated on some pages to fit and for voice.
The rest of the company then joined in and started testing the site and began recording issues and providing feedback in PivotalTracker, the agile project management tool we use. Our reviews uncovered parts of pages where the calls to action could be clearer and more visible, so we did a few more iterations on those pages that could be improved. With the pieces in place, we launched.
What's Next?
The last bit of the process has been fixing the problems that inevitably crop up post-launch. There are only small issues to deal with now. The continued reports from our users are helping us find the issues. Thanks, as always, to our awesome customers for helping us out!
That's the somewhat long story of Balsamiq.com's new face. I hope you like this aspect of our site's evolution, and most importantly that you find things easier, and that the user experience is better. There are more improvements on my list that can come later. I'm working on how to improve our onboarding experience with each category of product purchase, and as always, will continue to look for things that we can improve by listening for feedback in the forums. I look forward to hearing how we can make Balsamiq better for you!
One of the nice things about working in a small, flat organization is that you have to do support. With no levels of hierarchy and everyone monitoring support, communication is easy and fixes are fast. My experience today in trying to short circuit what appeared to be a small issue that is causing some pain to customers is a good example of how small can mean nimble and responsive.
The past few days of my first week I've been monitoring support and answering a few Get Satisfaction questions where I could. That's a part of everyone's job here. But it also helped with one of my primary goals this week, which was to get get a handle on the priorities and begin working on a few of these small projects. I've been getting up to speed on the apps, filing bugs, and looking at the UX priorities. I've also been thinking about how to attack the low hanging fruit. What I saw while doing some of this work in parallel, is that I might be able to do some triage and kill a few birds with one stone here and there.
The Upgrade Problem
I saw a few posts about issues people have with upgrading, knowing I had the same discomfort with the upgrade process myself. But I got back to work, and filed the issue in the back of my mind. I've also been doing a content inventory of the small Balsamiq.com site, and trying to get a handle on the IA there. I was looking at the really long and verbose pages we have, and in the process was going through scenarios like finding the upgrade link. I knew it would be hard for some people to figure out. It was too much work.
Then I came to the AIR upgrade badge and wondered how much of an issue that was. If you can think back to the first time you installed an AIR app, you might recall how seemingly quick the process was, when compared to downloading a package and executing it on your machine (running setup.exe on Windows or dragging a .app from a disk image on Mac). It's almost scary how seamless AIR installs are after that. Almost.
The issue for some with AIR installations, especially upgrades, is that they introduce different way of upgrading than what we're familiar with. You won't know what it feels like until you do it once. Hell, it can feel unfamiliar for a few times until it you've done it enough that it feels natural. I thought the only way to really know if this was pissing people off was to test it.
Doing Ninja-Usability Testing
There are various gradations of usability testing, but the ones I'm interested in are those that are cost effective while being easy enough for me to do quickly and remotely. Discount usability testing is about low cost methods for testing using only a handful of people that run through scenarios. The outcome is often that the most obvious problems are uncovered with the least investment in time and resources. Jakob Nielsen originated this idea. A radical version of this is the 5 second test, which I became aware of after reading an article describing the process at UIE.
For my needs, I wanted to just figure out this one problem. What do people experience when they try to upgrade Mockups for the Desktop? So I turned to remote usability testing tools. OpenHallway is one I've been testing out--they're a sponsor of Konigi and I'm writing a more in-depth of review of the service soon. What I wanted to do was to give people this simple scenario.
You've been using Balsamiq Mockups, and you want to upgrade to the latest version. Can you find the upgrade installer in the site?
Get to the point where you think you've found it and tell us where you think it is. Tell us what you would do at that point to upgrade.
So I put a call out on Twitter and stopped at 6 respondents. I wanted to test 1 problem with a few people. I don't know much about ninjas, but that seems pretty ninja-like to me.
The Feedback
This the feedback I got. My notes are quick and dirty. There are no task markers because there's only one task. There's no quantitative data to analyze. Just observation and common sense.
Tester 1
Wrote: You click on the "Install now" button
Notes: Started by scrolling through home page. Cliked Support > FAQ. Succeeded after searching the FAQ. Succeded in under 1 minute.
Tester 2
Wrote: After navigating through several pages, I found out that to upgrade the software, you simply download the latest copy off of the site.
Notes: Used the Support link after skimming the home page. Scrolled through the Support page and didn't find it and returned to Home/Products link. Clicked Desktop link in hero. Then appeared to read the page until scrolling down to Upgrade instructions. Found it, didn't sound confident at first. about 1'30" to complete task.
Tester 3
Wrote: Final thoughts:
1/ difficult to find download area
2/ difficult to see if by downloading the latest version it will be installed without deleting anything
3/ looks a bit like apple website without the blingbling effects
Notes: Skimmed the home page. Clicked the Products page, found home/products confusing. Went to desktop mockups product page. Then support. After filing with browsing, saying "not very useful stuff," went to search for "download" and tried the Examples page. Found the Desktop link and guessed that it was an install process.
Tester 4
Wrote: it wasn't there or at least i couldn't find it i was looking for upgrade or something similar
Notes: Failed or gave up task.
Tester 5
Notes: Scanned the home page for an upgrade link. Clicked Desktop product link and found the Upgrade heading below the fold. Then wondered "Would download the demo is the same as just downloading? I certainly don't want to buy it again." Successfully started the download, but wondered if she was doing the right thing.
Tester 6
NOTE: She took the test AFTER I had already made changes by creating a download page and adding the download link to the Header.
Wrote: The first thing I was looking for was a download link. It was on the top right of the first screen in the main navigation. I would have expected that if a new version is recently out that the home page would promote it more obviously though (so I looked in the main area before I looked at the navigation, which is where I expect to find it in a permanent fashion).
On the download page I had to interact with the Flash widget in order to get the download started. That was not expected, I was expecting to see some obvious "Download Version X for Y Platform" button - don't really understand the benefit of that little widget.
All in all it was straightforward to do it, but things just did not look like how I expected. The site could really use a visual refresh so that core content, navigation and important call to actions (like "Download the latest X") are visually differentiated.
Thanks!
Notes: She was successful in finding the Install badge quickly, but again the default AIR install badge is not familiar enough.
Taking the Low Hanging Fruit
Did you notice the funny note on the last one? She took the test after I had already made the changes after seeing what needed fixing in the first 5 tests. You could argue that those fixes were common sense anyway, but the audio from the users thinking out loud provided even more feedback about specific things with the AIR badge and what they expected. I didn't transcribe those notes here. Below is the plan I wrote up.
Immediate Plan
1. Create a download page with very little copy. Be sure to put in right keywords in title for search.
2. Add Download link in header.
3. Add a more prominent Download call to action in support page.
4. Think about interim ways to make call to action clear in home page without a major redesign.
Upcoming Plan
1. Vet the design of the updated download button (AIR badge) we already mocked up.
2. Add a link in Balsamiq or Help menus of desktop that goes to our new download page.
I've already done 1 and 2 from the first list. Download is now in the header and links to the new Download page.
Lessons Learned
It's been a fun first test and it was good to try using a service that's simple enough for my needs. I started by putting a session together at around 7am. I recruited via Twitter, got 6 respondents and waited while they ran their tests. By 10 I was watching their videos and wrote up notes and a plan for changes. I had lunch, and was making the changes by 1pm. That's how I want to do things around here.
