Yes, the age old moral question of to dip a chip once and be polite, or go back in for the double dip and possibly offend someone else who finds this behavior inappropriate. We have had many in-office discussions on the topic and to this day we have yet to come to a consensus, so I figured it would be a great metaphor for another wall we find ourselves up against often: product customization.

As a newbie developer I was always ambitious to add new settings to our application because it was possible and it would show of my abilities as developer. Crazy drop-down menu’s and ajax updating. Cool form validation and tabbed layouts. A customer would request a certain feature, and I’d be thinking how I could add a “simple” checkbox to easily accommodate their request. But with each successive checkbox came customization that was probably perfect for one client, but confusing and overkill for another.

Once you go down the path of providing the custom solutions, you are actually moving farther away from a solution for all. A search for antonyms of the word custom brings up words like departure, deviation, difference, and divergence. Before you know it you’ve created an exponential maze of settings to try an accommodate every permutations of what any customer could possibly think up.

I had to learn that to try an accommodate more people I should actually move up higher in the settings to be much broader and simpler, rather then going deeper and complex. The deeper you go, and the more permutations you have adds boat loads of work to development and actually makes your product much harder to work with. “Oh, you want to {name of simple feature}. Thats easy! First go to the setting page and…{begin list of about five settings that the client needs to set, on 4 different pages, and if they ever need to change something they will be calling you back anyways, cause they have no idea why they are setting them in the first place}”

Anything is “possible”. But does introducing possibilities introduce complexity that makes using your product a poor experience for everyone else, and a maintenance nightmare for your engineering and support teams. True double dipping is to move higher up and to simplify. If the broader solution of your product is not a good fit for someone, how is a more refined solution going to be any better (for the client or the company).

Back to my metaphor. I’m now pretty confident in my simplification of settings for our product, but I would like some closure on the whole chip double dipping debate. My argument is this: If upon a second dip, you come out of the bowl with more dip on your chip then you went in with, how is it possible that you left anything behind in the bowl that would pose a hazard to anyway else? I’m not not gonna double dip.

Maybe its time I call MythBusters.

If you’re looking to waste time and annoy your talent and boss on your next video shoot then follow this very easy step to achieve that goal. Rookie mistakes are always a killer.

With the new year we have moved our office downstairs. Here is a video of the absolute mess we currently have to clean up. Although the feng-shui is off, we’re still working at 100%.

Today I was watching a tutorial on Yahoo Pipes for an upcoming project. The tutorial was great and was very educational, however the related video area was not as flattering. When you use free platforms like Yahoo, YouTube or Vimeo, you’re subjected to the way they want to treat it. Like this example where I was offered a video tutorial on having sex in a car. Get Control Over Your Video!

Twas the weeks before the webinar with registrations at stake.

The team gathered around, all heads in an ache.

The invitations had been scheduled and sitting in cue.

They know they need conversions, and more than just a few.

“We need a solution, a better way to convert!”

“How about making a video?” … “Ugh! That’s going to hurt!”

“I know a producer, he’ll script and he’ll shoot…

However, the downside, he costs a lot of loot.”

“Forget it, there’s no time, we need to be frugal!”

“But wait! There’s hope, I just did a quick search on Google.”

It was VisibleGains, and its self-service solution.

One might even call it a video revolution.

So easy to use with it’s templates and scripts.

A few tips from a coach, and they were creating their own clips.

An image or two, a bulleted list.

Everything they needed to promote what not to miss.

Into the invite, they called out with action.

“Click here to watch our webinars attraction.”

Out went the invite, with video and all.

In came the registrants, the most ever seen they recall.

“Our webinar will be such a success”

“And just to think, we used video with such little stress!”

“Up next, testimonials! Let our customers be heard!”

“Video without VisibleGains, would just be absurd.”

Everyone is trying to get video on their site and I’m sure you are too.  You may be finding it difficult to find someone to sit in front of that camera, but don’t lose hope.  There are also great ways to create video without needing someone on screen.  Screen Casts are a great way to create video.  You can make a product demo, you can feature a slideshow, and you can make it look beautiful.  In this video I cover the basics from getting your idea down, your approach, recording, basic editing, and exporting your engaging, person free video.

View Programs You Can Use To Get Started

Framing your subject properly makes it much easier for a viewer to follow along with the video. Having the subject to high or low in the picture can make them look drowned out which can lead to viewer drop-off. The term for the space above the subjects head is called headroom. Here are three examples of headroom.

Too Much Headroom	Too Little Headroom	Perfect Headroom

It’s also good to think of your screen being split into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Typically when shooting you want to aim to have your subject centered to one of the vertical lines in the viewfinder. See Below for Example:

As you can see we have our subject to the right of the fame looking to the left of the camera. To achieve this you just need the subject to keep their body facing the camera or the interviewer and have them sit between 1-3 feet from the side of the camera.

Click Here To Download Setting Up Your Shot

As most of you know who read this blog, I work with supporting and coaching our clients and I feel that a lot of the success on a client typically happens with their relationship on support.  In a lot of companies people are sold on something from someone who seems to have all the right answers and has everything they’re looking for only to find out after they’ve signed when they need help, they are not achieving the same goals and the motivation that was shown by the sales person is not the same in support.  Usually you get a person reading a playbook before tossing you off to someone who actually knows what they’re doing which wastes 10 minutes or more.

I experienced this myself a few weeks ago from LaCie.  I purchased a network hard drive from them that didn’t seem to work right.  I sent in a support request through their website stating all the steps I took from testing different computers to different cables and to directly connecting to the drive which all didn’t work.  I was frustrated but I deal with troublesome hardware all the time.  The responses I got back were the standard playbook of restarting the device, shutting down and virus software and switching routers.  This frustrated me even more but I took the calm approach and went through and tested the items again and got back to LaCie.  I then get a second response to test different cables and use a different computer, which I had already said I told him I did in the first message.  At that point I told him to close the ticket and I returned the device.

You need to have good customer service.  Your brand, your marketing and sales depend on it.  The last thing you want to so is have a potential client google your company and pull up pages of people trashing your company on poor service or falling short on promises, unless you’re company is manufacturing politicians.

When I support clients I listen as best as I can.  I want them to feel like they’re talking to someone who know’s what they’re talking about.  It creates confidence in the client and creates a more personal connection knowing that we are here to look out for them which in turn makes the client more likely to be successful and become/remain a client.  Using a ticketing system and a forum is great but people need to be able to connect to a person on the phone or through an IM during business hours if they need to.  When your clients can put a face or have that more engaging connection with support it goes a long way and really helps out if you do drop the occasional ball and not return a call right away.  It helps knowing you’re reaching out to a person instead of putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into a sea of rocks.  Remember, you’re only going to be as successful as your clients are.

It may be a few weeks past Thanksgiving, but the leftover turkey sandwich I had for lunch says that it’s not too far away to write about some of the things that I’m particularly thankful for as a developer here at VisibleGains. There are lots of things that I use every day, whether it be a particular program, a general technology or a software library distributed freely over the internet. These are a just a few of the things that I have anthropomorphic dreams about on a daily basis. This post was partly inspired by a series of articles on Tested.com, as well as a series of lucid, turkey related hallucinations.

Open source software (and the helpful developer communities)

The other developers here and I write a lot of code. Almost on a daily basis even. And sometimes when we have to write something we look on the internet and it’s already there.

Every day I am amazed at some of the wonderful things that people have created. I am astounded even more so by the fact that they offer them up to any other developer (like-minded or not) who may find use from them. For free. And a lot of the time, support is even included. I’ve seen better support from a single developer with a small open source library than I have on most premium products. I’m not sure if it’s the sharing of a common pain, or perhaps some sort of more complicated hive-mind theory, but for some reason developers really enjoy helping each other out. Whether it’s simply answering questions or sharing some code that took them weeks to create so as to save time for someone else, the community has always been an indispensable resource to my daily key-hammering.

Automatic syncing, sharing and source control that works

That file you need? Yeah, it’s already on your computer. And that doc you want? In your Google account with the rest of them. Where am I right now? Doesn’t matter. How does it work? Magic.

With the giant cubicle farms of developers housed in our luscious 1,000,000 sq/ft. San Diego offices (editor’s note: we currently reside in Waltham, MA and our cubicle farm is currently only a cubicle cage…) and the multiple computers that some of us operate on sharing assets can get a bit hectic. Thankfully the days of swapping ZIP disks are long behind (most of) us. With such awesome stuff like Dropbox we can share wire frames, design assets and anything else our designer Jon wants us to re-code for the eleventieth time automatically without having to beg for them! Meanwhile, us developers use mercurial and bitbucket for our code source control while our whole company uses Google docs to share anything else. Not having to transport and manually update files is great, but not having to even ask for them in the first place is even greater.

Multiple monitors

Like a goldfish, my workspace will constantly grow to fill whatever area it is given. My only limit is set by the physical space the monitors take up and the current display technology.

This one speaks for itself really. It makes it much easier to have my code and reddit open at the same time without having to sacrifice window size.

Wireless technology

Wires are ugly and they get in my way. I don’t have time to get tangled up and deal with wires. I’m too important for them.

The fact that I still have to plug things into the wall really irks me. Wireless power can’t come to us consumers quickly enough.

There sure is plenty more that I am thankful for on a daily basis, but in order to keep the magnitude of this post down, I shall end it with those four. Stay tuned later this month for my next holiday-themed post, “Things That Make Me Cry on a Daily Basis.”

At VisibleGains we’re pretty agile in regards to development, we’re constantly iterating and releasing changes to our product.

The benefit to being agile is the ability to quickly react to outside feedback. As we are constantly immersed in our own product we can easily forget what its like to be an end user and what the first time user experience may be like.

The first time user experience is the only opportunity we have to make a positive first impression. All it takes is a frustrating first experience for a user to abandon a product or website.

One of the many ways we keep ourselves honest is through usability testing. Usability testing allows us to see how users really experience our product for the first time, and where we can make improvements.

Over the last few months we have been using a relatively inexpensive web based service to run usability tests called usertesting.com.

Usertesting.com leverages a crowd-sourced network of testers to quickly provide feedback within an hour of submitting a test. To run a test, all you need to provide is a URL and a series of tasks you would like the tester to perform. The end result is a 15min screen captured video of a tester navigating through the site, describing their experience along the way.

Overall, the results have been great! We have obtained a lot of honest feedback and I would definitely recommend the service. Now it’s time to iterate and put some of the feedback to good use.