Category: Product Development

SAY OLÁ TO YOUR PERSONAL STEAKHOUSE

2/22/2016

Straight from the heart of Brazil, we'd like to introduce you to one of the companies that we've been honored to be able to work with. While they love visiting the many Brazilian steakhouses in town, the team over at Brazilian Flame couldn't help but feel that there had to be a better way to experience the centuries-old traditions of the barbecues of their childhood. So they set out to make that happen.

Brazilian Flame invites you to experience the authentic flavor of a Brazilian grill, in the comfort of your own home. The Brazilian Flame Grill allows you to cook meat, fish, vegetables & more in a centuries-old Brazilian style BBQ. Welcome to your personal steakhouse.

As if their tagline wasn't enough to get your mouth watering, here's a clip to get you to Samba your way over to their website.

The team at Brazilian Flame is using a user guided approach to identify gaps in the market where consumer's needs aren't being met. As they journey through the User Guided Development Funnel with a carnaval of energy, they are using our team to help with digital and brand assets, as well as business model testing and product development.

Check them out and ask about their User Guided special promotion.

The User Guided Group can help you design, build and/or validate products and services. With the technical resources to develop your product roadmap, the marketing expertise to help you reach your customers, and the data-driven insights to let you know what's working, we can help your product succeed from the first step to the last.

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Make Your Products Viral, Not Your Privacy Policy

2/1/2016

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"You will allow us to use, edit your content with our service permanently, no limit and no recover." That’s what has been reported to have been on the makers of the Be Like Bill Facebook sensation’s privacy policy page. While there has been some debate around the authenticity of all the claims leveled against Blobla, a quick Google search reveals over fifty thousand news results for the recent allegations of the app being labeled “clickbait” and linked to malware and viruses. Putting aside the authenticity of the allegations, the incident has been a good reminder of the delicate balance that exists between the need to collect customer data to preserve value and the responsibility companies have been entrusted with by their customers and users of their products. Now is as good a time as any to review your company’s terms of service and privacy policies.

In case you missed it and have no idea what I’m referencing, here are a couple examples of what the Be Like Bill app allows Facebook users create and share.

While there were different flavors of the claim, Good Housekeeping summarized the privacy concerns well in saying, “...to make those annoying (and repetitive) pictures, people actually gave Blobla the right to use and edit their content permanently with "no limit and no recover," according to the terms of service. Translation: You're giving them free rein to your personal stuff.” Unfortunately for Blobla, they didn’t stop there. The author then proceeded to make the association with an unrelated article by the BBB that raised concern about nefarious Facebook apps that contain viruses and malware. To be fair, there are plenty of apps on Facebook that fall under “clickbait” scams. The association in this case seems unfounded, but as with many things on the Internet that didn’t stop it from becoming Internet reality, and was repeated over and over again.

In full on damage control, Blobla changed their terms and has been reaching out to media outlets to try and set the record straight. In their communication with KFVS12 they explained that they were removing the “no limit and no recovery “from its terms to avoid confusion. The only reason it would use content was because of its function for normal users to create a post in other languages.” Responding to the popular fact checking site Snopes.com cited the following:

The now-elided, widely-cited verbiage ("permanently, no limit and no recovery") was poorly composed and pertained to unrelated functions which might have ended up on their web site. “First, our game Be Like Bill doesn't require users to authorize a Facebook app," a spokesperson for Blobla wrote in response. "Of course if users want to share the results to Facebook, they must be logged in Facebook. However we use Facebook share dialog for users to share their results. It's a very common ... This doesn't allow us to collect any data from user's Facebook account. Second, we do not store any information of users on our servers, as stated in our ToS. Third, the Terms about our right to users' content is about posts on our website (a post may be a game like Be Like Bill, or a quiz, a video...). Because our website has a function for normal users to create a post in other languages. We have removed that term to avoid misunderstanding."

Paying a visit to Blobla’s current Terms of Service you can see that it has been changed to, “Your information you provide to us is used only to generate the results for the games you play or the quizzes you take. We do not store your information on our server, nor we provide it to 3rd parties.”

Which brings me to my point of writing this. With the growing awareness and scrutiny of companies privacy policies and terms of service policies, it is in your company’s best interest to provide clear and transparent verbiage of what information you collect and why. Anyone that has been in the position of crafting legal terms understands the rationale for blanket and open terms like those that were originally on Blobla’s site. The question you need to ask yourself is, “Do I want to be forced to clarify these terms when my product or service gains traction?” Because that is what will happen (it's not a question of "if"). You’ll have had the same terms for years, and then once your product finally takes off, you’ll have bloggers and the media suddenly caring about how you crossed your T’s and dotted your I’s. The good news is that there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a user would provide you with their data in exchange for the value of using your product or service. Both American Press and Goldman Sachs research found that only 20% of this group worry all of the time or most of the time about their privacy online, and that only 30% are concerned about big companies selling their information. But this same group is notorious about also not doing a great job at fact-checking before sharing (and keep in mind that Millennials are the largest users of most of the social media platforms). While they will gladly give you their data in exchange for your product, they will also gladly re-share the slanderous post about your company without checking the facts themselves. It’s the start of a new year, and it’s a great time to go dust off your privacy and terms of use policies and see if there’s anything that you can be more specific about.

Let’s end on a more positive note. In the BBB’s unrelated-to-Bloba article, they mentioned areas for consumers to be on the lookout. Out of the list, here are three that are good reminders for your company’s marketing:

Don't take the bait. Stay away from promotions of "exclusive," "shocking" or "sensational" pictures or video. If it sounds too outlandish to be true, it is probably a scam.

Unless you run a “clickbait” brand, savvy consumers are wising up to overly-sensational marketing. While it may get you the pageviews, it’s putting your brand at risk.

Hover over a link to see its true destination. Before you click, mouse over the link to see where it will take you.

If you are using URL shorteners, invest in a branded short URL, or at least add a “destination URL” test to your A/B testing cycle to ensure that your URLs aren’t hurting your campaigns conversion.

Don't click on links leading to unfamiliar websites.

Be mindful of using landing pages that aren’t your primary domain.

Your privacy and terms and conditions policies are critical legal tools, but don’t deserve the limelight that belongs to your products and services. Remember, whether it’s your product roadmap or your privacy policy, let your users guide your decision making.

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Testing With Mobile Emulators - Our Top Picks

1/25/2016

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With global mobile subscriptions now surpassing the world’s population, and with the mobile share of organic search engine visits in the United States growing to nearly half of all searches, it’s more important than ever to test your website and applications across multiple devices. But unless you have a drawer full of mobile devices, that isn’t easy and often is considered too time consuming. While there are plenty of companies offering testing services (BrowserStack) as well as grass root communities (Open Device Labs), emulators are a good alternative and a great first step.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, an emulator lets you mimic the behaviors of a system (e.g. a mobile device) on a different system (e.g. your desktop computer). This means that you can test the UI and UX of your website or application on as many different types of mobile devices as you’d like, all from the comfort of your desktop browser (pajamas optional).

The first step before you start is to determine which devices you need to test. While emulators make it easy, it’s still not feasible to test every mobile device. If you already have an existing site you can check your analytics to figure out which devices you should focus on (Audience > Mobile Devices in Google Analytics, for example). If you are launching a new site then you can search for the top device market share to as well as some basic demographic info about your target user. Here are a couple examples of what we mean by demographics:

Age and Income: Regardless of the market share of a particular mobile device model, your target user may not spend the money it takes to have the latest iPhone.
Location: Global distribution of popular mobile devices is location based. While high end smartphones are popular in the West, large phablets are more popular in the East (easier to type Eastern character sets), while phones with great battery life are more popular in developing countries.

Knowing your audience will help you prioritize your testing in the absence of historical data. This will allow you to increase your level of confidence in your launch, and give you the runway needed to collect the data for a more data-driven test.

Top Website Emulators

MOBILE EMULATOR BY PIXMOBI : The mobile emulator by Pixmobi is our top pick for website emulators due to it’s simplicity and device compatibility.

KEYNOTE : Keynote offers a whole range of options, from a free trial to real device testing.

MOBILETEST.ME : They offer a limited number of free devices to emulate on, with an affordable rate to unlock hundreds more.

IPAD PEEK: Despite recent market share declines, the iPad is still a major player and a leader in tablet hardware specs. For that reason, we use Ipad Peek to emulate websites.

Be sure and test both landscape and portrait orientations since landscape usually will fall outside of the “mobile” media query (i.e. your hamburger mobile menu won’t show) and can cause issues for websites with larger navigations

Top Application Emulators

ANDY : Our top pick for an Android emulator goes to Andy, which lets you run mobile apps on with Windows and Mac. It’s a more well rounded Android emulator and doesn’t focus on gaming the way that BlueStacks does. Andy lets users sideload third-party apps, customize the Android experience, including allowing advanced users customize the virtual machine specs (e.g. RAM, CPU cores, etc.). This is great for testing your app since you can emulate slower Android devices. Keep in mind that Andy runs a “newer” version of Android, so if your users tend to be on older OS versions, then that is something you’ll want to keep in mind.

APPLE SIMULATOR : For emulating iOS, the Apple Simulator allows you to rapidly prototype and test builds of your app during the development process. Advanced users can install it as part of the Xcode tools, allowing Simulator to run on their Mac and behave like a standard Mac app while simulating an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Apple TV environment. (iOS for Mac).

If you run into any issues and purchasing new devices isn't in your budget, you can always purchase a cheap HDMI dongle, or a phone or tablet off of a site like eBay, Geekbuying or Pandawill.

Regardless of how you test, it’s critical that you test. Emulators make it so easy that there is no excuse to ensure that your new website or app works well across your user’s top devices. After that, plan on actively monitoring user feedback, be prepared with a user-centric response for those that experience issues, and have a process in place to quickly document those issues, test and get them resolved.

We'd love to hear from you. Did we miss an emulator that you have used and liked? Let us know in the comments or through some other way.

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SAY OLÁ TO YOUR PERSONAL STEAKHOUSE

Make Your Products Viral, Not Your Privacy Policy

Testing With Mobile Emulators - Our Top Picks

Top Website Emulators

Top Application Emulators

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