ByteLion

ByteLion named as a Top Software Development Firm

Matthew Lowinger — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 19:49:40 +0000

Clutch Names ByteLion as a Top Software Development Agencies in Baltimore and Part of Their 2020 Global 1000.

We got the news and are proud to announce that not only is ByteLion ranked as one of the best software development companies on the 2020 list on Clutch. But we are also included in their Global 1000 – a list that ranks the 1000 leading custom development firms within our industry from all over the world.

This kind of recognition proves that our team’s skills are world-class and can compete with anyone from around the world. This is the reason why we always appreciate our clients who take the time to leave their wonderful reviews on B2B ratings platforms like Clutch.

The award validates all the hard work and long hours our team puts into each project everyday. Our CEO, Terrance MacGregor, summed up the team’s feelings best.

“The ByteLion team is proud to be named one of the leading global companies in 2020 by Clutch. ByteLion catalyzes digital transformation which is representative of our team member’s hard work and dedication. We are thankful to all of our team members and customers for another tremendous year” – Terry MacGregor, CEO of ByteLion.

For our team, the year 2021 isn’t going to be any different. We are excited to partner with more great enterprises and startups in the year to come. Fill out our contact form and we can get in touch to learn how we can solve your business challenges with custom software.

The post ByteLion named as a Top Software Development Firm appeared first on ByteLion.

Before You Apply To Be A Software Intern

Willam Forbes — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 16:35:46 +0000

Being an intern at a small company is a huge commitment if it is done well. A company needs to develop an accountability program, design work, setup mentors, and give constant feedback and supervision for work that has the potential to be profitable. More likely than not, however, intern work will be a cost center. Why do small companies do it then? The answer is simple, it allows a company to build a bond with a junior person very early on in their career, and it provide them with a pipeline to select individuals that can have a very real impact on the company’s bottom line. Before you accept the job, you have to ask yourself:

Will I be a good investment for the company?

A good investment means that you have positioned yourself to make the company money. You need to understand the business model of the company you are applying for. Your goal is to make sure you won’t be a burden to the bottom line, that you are up on current technology trends, and you can contribute day 1 to a mission to help the company. If you show up and say, “I came here to learn. Can you teach me everything? What are my hours?”, you have walked into your internship with an F. To be effective, you need to have done prep work.

Every Software Company’s Dream Intern

Nothing is more powerful to a software company than a computer science student that has built a product end to end. In order to do that, a student must have mastered front end development (enough to get something working) and backend development (databases, APIs, hosting). They can demo that product from their open source github account or if it is private, be able to demo it confidently. What matters most is that it works, solves a problem, and you can explain how it functions.

The Perfect Answer To The Question

Why do you want to intern here?

I am super interested in the company. I read every word on your website, and I think that I can help you with ABC and maybe D. As I understand it, your company makes $ by doing X. I have being doing X and I can help you do X by 1,2,3. I don’t want a traditional internship. I am looking to secure a role in a high speed company and help grow it.

Prepping for your Internship

Learn a simple modern day front end framework like react. It will take 2 weekends (both days) non stop to get through a few tutorials (40 hours)
Learn a backend framework, like ExpressJS ( 40 hours)
Use a PAAS (platform as a service like AWS) ( 40 hours)
Set up logging to a remote location ( 8 hours)
Setup database backups (1 hour)
Build a rock solid login or use a third party login system (40 hours)
Build role based views and actions into your application (40 hours)
Integrate with a subscription service payment tool like Stripe. (20 hours)

Total = ~230 hours of self led, self managed time

Interested In A Software Internship?

We would love to talk with you if the article above didn’t scare you! Contact us at careers@bytelion.com.

The post Before You Apply To Be A Software Intern appeared first on ByteLion.

How to Run a Remote Design Workshop

Marc Hausle — Fri, 22 May 2020 19:50:42 +0000

Last week, Bytelion had the opportunity to participate in MICA’s UX Design MPS Virtual Residency. This interactive workshop was held for over 50 graduate students across the world looking to transition into or jumpstart their careers in UX design. After speaking with Daniel Sipzner regarding possible topics for workshops during the event, Bytelion decided to focus on “UX design within project constraints” as a topic. Below we will go over how we approached the workshop, some of our successes, and what we could do better next time.

Goals

During our planning, we approached this workshop with the following goals in mind for the students:

Ensure students understand the value of UX processes in terms of what is providing value to the project as opposed to set deliverables
Relay the importance of time-boxing activities
Provide students with a base template for an ‘ideal’ project and answers to their questions to help them develop their own UX process
Have students work in a group and effectively communicate how they think the UX process should be customized to provide the most value for an example project
Help students actively think about project planning by having them allocate percentages of their allotted time to their planned activities and thinking critically about their deliverables
Students will have a UX process personalized to their strengths that can work as a template for future project planning
Each student will gain experience planning out UX projects down to the number of hours per day in addition to which steps are needed or not needed depending on project specifications.

Planning

The workshop was held twice in back to back sessions, with each session lasting 2.5 hours.

Here is a break down of our agenda:

Part 1 – Introduction (30 minutes)

Introductions (5 minutes)
- Marc
- Stefanie
Marc’s Presentation: Why are we here designing things and how do we do it? (15 minutes)
Stefanie’s Presentation: Insight from a MICA Alum (5-10 minutes)

Break (5 minutes)

Part 2 – Solo and Team Exercises (45 minutes)

Solo Exercise: Fill out UX Process Details (10 minutes)
Solo Exercise: Fill out UX Process Percentages (5 minutes)
Marc’s Presentation: Sample Project Breakdown Explanation (5 minutes)
Getting into Teams!!! (5 minutes)
Team Exercise: Fill out Team UX Process Details (5 minutes)
Team Exercise: Read Mock Project Description (5 minutes)
Team Exercise: Discuss the Mock Project (5 minutes)
Team Exercise: Fill out Team Process Percentages (5 Minutes)

Break (5 minutes)

Part 3 – Team Exercises and Follow Up (45 minutes)

Team Exercise: Project Estimation (30 minutes) [Marc joined rooms to answer questions]
- Team Reassessment of Project Steps and Percentages (10 minutes)
- Organize Steps into a Project Plan and Assign Hours (10 minutes)
- Review & Refine Plan (10 minutes)
Team Presentations (10 minutes; 2 minutes per team)
Solo Exercise: Students Vote for Best Solution (5 minutes)
Marc: Explanation and Questions (remaining time)

Logistics & Materials

Presentation material communicated via a slide deck.
A UX process template provided to all participants.
Directions for team activities provided to all participants.
Miro board with templates for each group and their activities provided to all participants.

Tools

Google Slides
Google Drive
Zoom
Miro
Webcam
Computer
Beanie

MICA students collaborated in teams and worked on a virtual artboard created by Bytelion in Miro.

Where We Could Have Done Better!

Timing – We allotted for 20 minutes of extra time or 20 minutes of questions. This was not enough time. We did not account properly for needing to communicate directions multiple times regardless of documentation provided. Due to some students having no experience with project planning or working in Miro, additional clarity was necessary. On the plus side, participants were willing to stay 15 minutes late after each workshop to ask questions.

Providing More Documentation – Despite providing multiple documents in addition to having the Miro board set up prior to the workshop starting, we feel we could have provided more for participants to reference when they missed certain concepts. We should have provided the itinerary above so students could better understand how the various exercises worked together from the start.

Things to Consider for Future Workshops

Questions During or Afterward – We allowed participants to ask questions during the workshop as a way of keeping them more engaged and excited about the work they were doing. We also wanted to make sure that they understood exactly what there were doing, as this was a fairly new concept for most of them. This also added to our time but seemed to result in people being more comfortable with the process and understanding its value.

What Went Well!

Establishing Trust – We were fortunate to have a recent graduate of the program as a new hire at Bytelion. Stefanie had the opportunity to speak about some of the things she had learned as she transitioned from an academic setting to working in the private sector, which resonated with what current students were experiencing.

Connectivity and Audio/Visual Quality – We had few connectivity issues during the 5 hours of the workshop. Both video and sound quality were generally good. Prior planning and testing technology in advance helped a lot here.

Providing Value – Students said that they had not been so excited to work so hard all week and learn about real world UX constraints. Multiple students also expressed that if given the option they would love to take a class on the topic.

The post How to Run a Remote Design Workshop appeared first on ByteLion.

Clutch Supports Small Businesses Like Ours

Adam Claure — Thu, 07 May 2020 18:58:30 +0000

When we think of the economy and the firms that drive it forward, too often we think of the mega-corporations, the household names, and the gigantic success stories. What we don’t always think about, though we should, is the small businesses.

In the United States alone, small businesses account for 99% of all economic activity. They’re all around us, contributing every day to innovation, to the national workforce, and to creating the products that enrich our lives. In other words, if we want a healthy economy, we need to focus on small businesses.

What makes us so passionate about small businesses? Well, we here at Bytelion are one of them. Though we’ve been around for nearly 10 years, we’ve managed to stay small, gaining expertise in the development industry, maintaining a close-knit team, and perfecting our company culture. We know there’s so many advantages to being a small company, and we’re determined to support our fellow small agencies through this difficult time.

One special way we’ve decided to show our support is by starting within and showcasing some of our own team’s incredible accomplishments over the years. Often, we turn to Clutch, a ratings and reviews platform, to reflect on our past projects.

Here’s one of our most recent success stories: our team helped a mental health program develop a custom software. Mary Beth Beaudry, Admin Director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center was pleased with our team’s performance. “By far Bytelion has been the best company with whom we have worked. Professional, approachable, conscientious, exacting,” she said. “They produced a world-class product all while ensuring our needs and expectations were being met.”

We’re appreciative of the kind words and thrilled that we’ve been able to achieve success for our partners. Our years of experience as a small company has helped us to perfect our services and solutions, and we couldn’t be more proud of our team.

It’s great to have a platform like Clutch to reflect on our success, as well as our shortcomings, so we can continue to work hard and improve. We also have a profile on their sister site, The Manifest, another awesome tool that includes business leaders and insights across industries. We’d love it if you checked it out!

If you’re in the market for a development partner who can help you accomplish your goals, don’t hesitate to reach out—you’ll support a small business while you’re at it. We’re excited to hear from you!

The post Clutch Supports Small Businesses Like Ours appeared first on ByteLion.

6 Key Ways to Improve Your eCommerce User Experience

Marc Hausle — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 20:48:08 +0000

When customers shop online, it is similar to shopping in a brick and mortar store. They have a goal in mind– whether to buy a specific item or to browse your inventory– and they want to make their purchase as seamlessly as possible. To customers, your website’s homepage is your storefront. Your category pages allow your customers to walk through your product aisles. Your product detail pages provide shoppers the information they would expect from holding an item and reading the packaging.

In the eCommerce world, competition is more fierce. If customers cannot easily find what they need on your website, they are only a few clicks away from your competitors.

Providing a compelling user experience (UX) is critical to your company’s eCommerce success to increase conversions and boost other KPIs. The goal is to transition curious visitors to loyal customers. And when a website is designed with the customer in mind, it creates a user-friendly shopping experience that builds trust in your brand.

Here are Bytelion’s top tips to instantly improve your eCommerce website’s user experience:

1. Think mobile-first

Experts project that 45% of the total eCommerce revenue in the US will come from mobile purchases in 2020, and these numbers are expected to keep growing in coming years. Your website’s homepage is your first impression to visitors, which will often determine if they continue engaging with or leave your site. Websites that are not optimized for smaller devices can make it tricky for visitors to navigate, especially if buttons are too small to tap or the layout does not change to fit the new size. Usability testing, a research method in which UX designers observe and understand how people interact with interfaces, is a great way to ensure that designs are easy to use on different platforms. eCommerce websites that think ‘mobile-first’ save a lot of money during the design and development process by strategically building for both a mobile and desktop audience.

B&H’s website adapts to a user’s screen size. While product details and changing images are displayed to the user on the desktop website (shown above), the mobile-optimized website (shown right) is more intuitive for scrolling and tapping behaviors, which makes it user-friendly for small screens.

The navigation bar is consolidated into a menu to save screen size, and large buttons replace text, which makes tapping easier. Product category tiles stack to prevent crowding on the page, which lets visitors easily scroll through their options to find what they need.

2. Make sure your calls-to-action (CTAs) are crystal clear to shoppers

Your goal is to help visitors find what they need and complete their purchase. By keeping the visitor’s next steps clear, you help reduce user confusion and potential frustration. CTAs such as “Add to Cart” or “Check Out” should be clear, large, and easily visible to your shoppers.

This is a great opportunity to use some of your brand colors too, but make sure that your font size and colors make your buttons legible. UX designers regularly conduct user interviews to help inform site design decisions that keep the customer in mind. The effectiveness of website CTAs can often fall on labeling, color and other visual indicators. For example, buttons labeled “Submit” vs. “Cancel” should be easily distinguishable from one another by utilizing different colors, icons, text and formatting.

The CTAs on Etsy’s website are large and emphasized by bold outlines or filled in with black to make it stand out on the page. The button text is legible to shoppers, and by using different designs for each of the buttons, it is clear to users that the buttons complete different actions. Additionally, the site utilizes icons that help to show shoppers what they can expect to come next.

3. The checkout process should be effortless

The checkout process is often a website’s make-it-or-break-it point. Once shoppers have their credit cards ready, they will be the most critical about their confidence in you as a company. A well-designed checkout process should be simple and transparent to keep online shoppers at ease.

Keep the checkout process short and straightforward. Only ask for information you actually need to complete the purchase. Visualizing the shopper’s progress with a completion bar, for example, also helps set their expectations of how close they are to finalizing their purchase. Visitors should also have the option to check out as a guest, especially since some shoppers will be hesitant to provide more information than necessary. You can recommend making an account to make future checkouts easier, but forcing visitors is a guaranteed way to lose potential sales.

Transparency is key when it comes to building trust. Shoppers will not share sensitive information if they think a website is sketchy or unsafe. To build trust, provide transparency in pricing, including the breakdown of taxes and shipping costs. Apart from sheer convenience, accepting payment methods such as PayPal and Apple Pay can also help provide a sense of security to the customer by allowing them to pay through a linked trusted account.

The reason why Amazon comes up often in eCommerce examples is due to the thought they put behind their online shopping UX. In a single page, shoppers can review their default shipping and payment information while still having the option to make any changes. By providing transparency in shipping options, cost breakdown, and only showing the last four digits of the credit card number, Amazon builds user trust and credibility. It does not get much easier than placing an order with one click.

4. Visitors should easily find what they are looking for

Simply put, users should know where they are on your site at all times and should be able to easily move through the pages to find what they are looking for. Information on the page should be clear, whether the customer is looking at details for a specific product or browsing through a category of related items. How your website pages are structured is incredibly important, balancing the defined user needs on your website, while also considering search engine optimization (SEO). A well-designed eCommerce site will provide easy navigation for new customers as well as specificity that helps returning customers find exactly what they need. Providing a search bar is a great example of a website feature used to help customers quickly find specific items they have in mind.

Nike provides very simple navigation for its shoppers. With only a few main categories, visitors are not overwhelmed and can easily find relevant subcategories when hovering over the navigation bar. A search bar is also available for shoppers who know what they want and can be used by entering specific keywords to return results.

5. Product details should communicate information the shopper needs

Unlike shopping in a store, eCommerce shoppers are dependent on your product detail pages to understand the product they are considering purchasing. An effective product page is designed around the information that is most important to your visitor.

Product names should be clear and descriptions be concise and include all the necessary details. Additionally, product images are also critical since this will be one of the first ways shoppers identify both the item and its quality. Having high-resolution photos and multiple angles help build customer trust that they will be getting what they purchase. The contents of your descriptions and product details will differ from product to product; however including a few sentences and dimensions or sizes are a good start.

As you learn about your users’ needs and habits, the next step to creating a delightful shopping experience is by personalizing content. Perhaps your user seems to like a specific item or style based on previous purchase or browsing information? When viewing a product page, offering suggested items that align with the user’s interests presents them valuable information and can help increase sales.

ModCloth, a women’s clothing retailer, provides a clear product page and helps visitors easily find the information they need about an item. Multiple images are provided to show the product from different angles, with added personality to make the visitor’s experience more delightful. The title and pricing are very clear, as are potential discounts and ratings. Visitors can see all available sizes and colors, and the product descriptions and details are all available on the same page, separated by clickable tabs to prevent overwhelming amounts of information from appearing all at once.

6. eCommerce websites should cater to different shopping styles

A successful eCommerce website is designed for the needs of various shopper types, including visitors who are browsing as well as buyers that know exactly what they want. When a visitor is not sure what they are looking for, category pages are important. Understanding what types of products your website offers and being able to compare individual items within those categories helps visitors evaluate their options before making their selection. On the other hand, when a visitor knows what they are looking for, a combination of search and filters will help them find their product quickly. Filters are ideal for buyers who know what they want, since they display specific results that fit the shopper’s exact needs.

Airbnb’s website allows visitors to view all available accommodations for their location and timeframe on a map, organized in a list on the left side of the initial search. This helps guide browsers who want to view all their available options. For buyers with intent, the filter menu allows them to select exactly what they want from their stay, ranging from facilities to house rules to the language the host speaks.

Bytelion’s Process

Providing a positive eCommerce experience begins with the consumer and understanding how people shop online. The tips above are useful for optimizing your website, but it is also important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all model for all eCommerce websites. The needs of someone looking for a specific cleaning product differs vastly from someone browsing for shoes to match an outfit. It’s also important to note that no website is able to do everything perfectly (even eCommerce giants like Amazon have received a lot of critique), so it is important to understand your target customers.

To achieve an eCommerce website optimized for your customers, it requires a dedicated team of professionals to learn about customers’ needs through research, adapt website designs to fit those needs, and continue to follow customer and industry changes. UX work is not a one-time task but a dynamic process that evolves with your business. All eCommerce websites are different and approaches need to be personalized for each site and its customers. To learn more about our team and unique UX processes, click here. To see if your eCommerce site could use some outside feedback, sign up for a free audit here!

The post 6 Key Ways to Improve Your eCommerce User Experience appeared first on ByteLion.

React Native Client-Side Data Storage Solutions

Greg Crouse — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 21:14:48 +0000

In order to develop a mobile application with maximum DIL [Disconnected, Intermittent, Low-bandwidth] functionality, local data storage is essential. Within the React Native ecosystem, there are a number of options to consider.

Simple Storage Solutions

AsyncStorage is an asynchronous, unencrypted, persistent, key-value storage system. AsyncStorage is a perfect solution if the data to be stored is simple, lightweight, and not sensitive in nature. This solution is supported in bare and managed workflows in Expo.

SecureStore is another asynchronous, persistent, key-value storage option available in React Native. SecureStore enables the storage of key-value pairs in an encrypted data store. The size limit is 2048 bytes for the value. This solution is also supported in bare and managed workflows in Expo.

Persisting simple data in key-value pairs is highly useful but it is typical that mobile applications will require the storage of more complex data structures. Because of this need, there are many options to choose from.

SQlite vs. NoSQL

SQLite is a relational database management system (RDMS). It uses tables where data is defined by columns and stored in rows. Each table has a unique name and may relate to one or more other tables in the database through common values. NoSQL databases are document-based, key-value pairs, graph databases or wide-column stores. They also do not have standard schema definitions that need to be adhered to. Additionally, NoSQL data stores are typically not relational.

SQL databases have a predefined schema. NoSQL databases have a dynamic schema for unstructured data. Therefore, migrations are necessary when schema changes are made when leveraging a SQL/SQLite database. For apps with the need to store unstructured or constantly changing data structures, a NoSQL solution is best.

SQL/SQLite databases are a better fit for complex query intensive applications. SQLite implementations often will have an abstraction layer to allow developers to interact with the database in the native language of the project. SQLite also implements most of the Structured Query Language (SQL) standard. This allows developers to implement custom SQL queries if needed. In general, NoSQL databases don’t have standard interfaces to perform complex queries. Typically the queries themselves in NoSQL are not as powerful as SQL query language.

React Native Datastore Options

This is a list with a brief description of some of the options for client-side mobile application data storage solutions capable of handling more complex data than AsyncStorage or SecureStore.

NPM (Node.js Package Manager) is the most useful package manager for JavaScript. NPM is very commonly used by React Native developers to install critical libraries to be implemented into their mobile applications. Below is a graph generated using the NPM Trends tool. This gives a sense of how often the packages we are going to look at are downloaded by developers through NPM. It will also illustrate the current trends for data storage solutions in React Native.

_______________________

SQLite

The React Native SQLite module creates a client-side SQLite database that can be queried through a WebSQL-like API. SQLite is a small, fast, reliable, and self-contained SQL database engine. It is one of the most commonly used database engines and is leveraged by all kinds of applications on any platform and is supported in Expo managed and bare workflows. SQLite data stores can be encrypted using SQLite Encryption Extension (SEE) or plugins like SQLiteCrypt and SQLCipher. Unfortunately, it does not look like these libraries are supported in Expo managed workflows at the time of this writing (December 2019).

realm

Realm is an object-oriented NoSQL database. As such it provides memory-efficient access to data by using Realm objects, which usually consume less RAM than native objects. Realm also has faster performance than SQLite and some other data storage solutions. The client-side datastore includes a built-in framework for seamless data syncing with Realm backend storage solutions. Custom security protocols for each of the different device platforms is also one of the strengths of Realm. As of this writing (December 2019), Realm is not supported in Expo managed workflow.

pouchDB

Pouchbase is a client-side datastore with a JSON-based NoSQL interface. It can be used as an abstraction layer over SQLite or by default it ships with IndexedDB adapter for the browser, and a LevelDB adapter in Node.js. The primary reason to adopt PouchDB is to leverage the built-in framework to enable data synchronization with CouchDB server-side data storage solutions. Client-side PouchDB instances can be encrypted using the Simple-Cryptor-Pouch plugin. As of this writing (December 2019), PouchDB is not supported in Expo managed workflow.

mongoDB

MongoDB is a document-based NoSQL database that reads and writes JavaScript objects. It includes the ability to sync to MongoDB backend datastore. The ability to encrypt the client-side data store instance is built-in. As of writing (Dec 2019) MongoDB is not supported in Expo managed workflow.

couchbase

Note from developers on the react-native-couchbase-lite repo: This plugin works for Couchbase Lite 1.x only. For new projects, we recommend to use the Couchbase Lite 2.0 Native API and to write your own wrapper to access Couchbase Lite APIs from a JavaScript codebase (see https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/communication-ios.html).

Disclaimer on the react-native-couchbase-lite repo: “This package is not an official couchbase plugin and is not supported in any way by couchbase. If you have issues with it please do not use the couchbase forums but raise an issue here instead. Although this package does work as described it may not be fully featured and may not be suitable for your requirements. This package is just a thin layer over the CBL REST API, PRs and suggestions are welcome!”

It does not appear like the developers of Couchbase are currently supporting a React Native implementation of their client-side data storage solution. The best React Native compatible client-side data storage solution with built-in server-side Couchbase syncing at the time of writing (December 2019) is PouchDB.

If you are looking for application support as it relates to building applications in disconnected, intermittent, and low bandwidth environments (DIL), contact us here. Bytelion has developed a portfolio of apps meant to sustain connectivity and support local data storage.

The post React Native Client-Side Data Storage Solutions appeared first on ByteLion.

Advanced Search Experience with Algolia

Adam Claure — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 13:07:26 +0000

Providing the customer with an excellent search experience is one of the most overlooked aspects of successful eCommerce websites. According to Forrester Research, 43% of website visitors go directly to the search bar when they open a website for the first time. This means that, for nearly half of your user base, the search functionality of your website will be their first impression, so it had better be good! ECommerce giants like Amazon fully understand this, so they have spent significant resources on ensuring that the search experience of their website is user-friendly and effective. Considering how universal Amazon is today, they have essentially set the bar for advanced search experiences, and as such, your average user will expect high-quality search by default.

This poses a significant challenge to the average eCommerce website. Very few eCommerce websites have the resources that Amazon has to engineer this kind of experience from the ground up. After all, an online merchant is not a search engine company – they should be able to focus their time and resources on other aspects of the website. Nonetheless, users will be expecting a search experience that rivals that of Amazon’s. So how can the average online merchant deliver advanced search features their users expect without exhausting their resources?

One great option is to utilize a tool like Algolia! Algolia is “a hosted search engine, offering full-text, numerical, and faceted search, capable of delivering real-time results from the first keystroke.” By using Algolia to implement a search solution, eCommerce sites can rest easy knowing that their search functionality is solid while freeing up resources to focus on other aspects of the platform. Let’s take a look at some of the advanced search features that are made easy by Algolia, and how it can help you drive sales and deliver the search experience that your customers expect.

Guided Search

A relatively simple but overlooked feature is what’s known as guided search. The screenshot above depicts the guided search feature on Coursera.com, whose search is powered by Algolia. As you can see, as the user types, they are recommended popular search terms. This helps to make the user’s experience more streamlined, so they can get to the product they’re looking for faster, or be inspired by some of the other popular search terms and decide to buy something else.

Federated search

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to find content other than merchandise on an eCommerce site, such as blog posts, corporate news, FAQS, etc. Using federated search technology, search queries can be done on multiple content sources simultaneously. This means that when a user searches for a product, the results could also include, for example, any relevant blogs posts about the same or similar products. This increases visibility to non-merchandise content on your website and could potentially motivate users to spend more time on your website, which is always a good thing.

Personalized search

A great search experience will not be the same for every user. Using personalized search features, search results on the same exact query can vary from user to user, based on a variety of factors. For example, a user that is located somewhere with a hot climate might have more warm-weather clothing in their results. The displayed results can also take a user’s past shopping habits into consideration, prioritizing brands that the user has purchased before. This helps to make the user’s shopping experience more relevant to them, increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

Analytics

On top of all the great search features that Algolia provides for your customers, they provide valuable analytics into what your users are searching for and buying, all displayed in a convenient dashboard. At a glance, this allows you to see trending search terms, which search terms lead to the most conversions, which search terms are returning no results, and more. Even if Algolia did not provide any added search functionality to your website, these search metrics would be extremely valuable. These insights into what people are looking for and buying allows online merchants to rapidly respond to its customers’ shopping habits and take steps to increase sales.

Conclusion

These are just some of the advanced search features that Algolia can add to your eCommerce website, for a fraction of the cost of building them in-house. You can check out the documentation yourself at https://www.algolia.com/doc/ for a deep dive into the additional features they offer. Using the robust features of Algolia, one of our team members here at Bytelion helped improve the search experience on Under Armour’s website, resulting in 35% increased conversions from search. If you are interested in seeing similar improvements on your eCommerce site, please contact us. We can conduct a free eCommerce audit on your tool to give you actionable insights.

The post Advanced Search Experience with Algolia appeared first on ByteLion.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud – Product to Customer Centric Enterprise

Sonika Kannegalla — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 22:03:20 +0000

As technology evolves rapidly and shopping trends shift on a daily basis. eCommerce is in a constant state of adaptation that can leave brands fumbling in the dark.

Bytelion has worked with companies that employ a number of eCommerce tools, many of which don’t meet the challenges we face today. Ultimately, companies need to respond quickly to changing demands with flexible eCommerce built around your customers.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud As Your Solution

Commerce Cloud is a multi-tenant, cloud-based commerce platform that empowers brands to create intelligent, unified buying experiences across all channels i.e. mobile, social, web, and store. Leveraging the power of the cloud, Salesforce helps you craft innovative customer experiences that drive conversions and inspire brand loyalty. It allows companies to handle their entire business operations from a single place. After 10+ years in the eCommerce world, Bytelion has found Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a robust tool to ensure revenue stability and growth in times of economic unpredictability.

B2B Commerce Cloud – is optimized, customized, and integrated so that you can get the complete freedom to curate the entire customer journey. This starts from the first click in the purchase journey to order fulfillment.

B2C Commerce Cloud – connects with consumers and delivers personalized shopping experiences across all e-commerce channels i.e. web, mobile, social, and in-store. This platform enables digital experience and frictionless transactions at every touchpoint. B2C Commerce provides the resources and processing for your eCommerce sites, called a storefront in the Commerce Cloud documentation to help create and build your sites in your vertical.

Is Salesforce perfect for your business?

Today, companies need the best products and services available. As demand for online sales increases, tools that offer numerous capabilities and features are essential. Commerce Cloud provides the capabilities that ensure a personalized shopping experience for you and your customers.

Excellence capabilities – helps to manage the products, pricing, and promotions to boost customer engagement.
Operational capabilities – facilitates functionality over multiple channels, linking the backend process with the fulfillment of orders.
Intelligence capabilities – provide more clear data insights for guiding us with customer interaction(AB testing), engagement, and quick business decisions.

In the past few years, companies that grew their market share have either been native digital organizations or cloud enterprises. For this, companies need an expert team to help rematch, reinvent, and strategize the digital transformation journey.

Bytelion’s work:

Pier 1 Imports is the eighth-largest furniture retailer in the United States and its eCommerce platform is hosted and deployed in a standard Salesforce Cloud. Pier 1 Imports recruited Bytelion’s team of eCommerce designers and developers to optimize its eCommerce platform.

Bytelion is delivering an outsized impact on UI improvements through commitment to adaptation and efficiency. We learned a fully customized Commerce Cloud and navigated complex development systems to accomplish significant strides in software development. This transformed the user experience and contributed to increasing eCommerce revenue. Our team contributed heavily to frontend and backend development, automated quality assurance (QA) testing, and implemented best technical and organizational practices within their team and across the project.

Bytelion drives with speed and agility. We leverage our UX skills and design process to improve and create completely new personalized customer experiences. Bytelion helps build and drive the processes and campaigns that companies need to bring these experiences to life in quick, smart iterations.

We offer development support:

Trouble shooting: Promptly react to complex performance, security or other Salesforce issues, which need to be fixed on the code level.
System evolution: Implement enhancements, including substantial ones, to a Salesforce solution according to change requests. Modifies default functionality quickly with no impact to current business operations in Salesforce.

To learn how Bytelion can help your Commerce Cloud platform, sign up for free audit. Our team of user experience designers will run a thorough assessment and provide actionable insights to help grow your online sales.

The post Salesforce Commerce Cloud – Product to Customer Centric Enterprise appeared first on ByteLion.

GitHub Template to Kickstart Your Project

Cooper Luetje — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 14:57:27 +0000

Have you ever needed to ramp up on a project quickly to produce a product as soon as possible? Typically, development teams start out fresh by creating a brand new code project; however, creating new projects from scratch can forfeit time that would otherwise go into building out new features. A GitHub template can help developers reuse code to bring a product to production level at a much faster rate.

We use templates at Bytelion to help our startup clients achieve their goals in a smaller time frame. Check out this GitHub template for a Ruby on Rails API project we have created. In this post we will demonstrate how we created this template so you can get started with recycling your code!

4 Steps to Create a Template Repository

1. Create a new repository that will host the GitHub template

Creating a new repository is the first step to creating your first GitHub template. To create a new repository select the plus button from the top of the page and enter the required info. You can choose to share your repository with the public or you can keep it hidden between you and your team!

2. Generate your code for reusing as a template project

Once you have a repository created you can add any code that you would like to use as a template. In our example Rails template we chose to have a Rails API that will be ready to use, the only steps left are to create our models and controllers that will be used when the API is called by a client.

3. Mark the repository as a template

When the code in the project is complete, navigate to the settings tab in GitHub and select the option to mark the project as a template repository.

4. Use the template to create a new project

To create a new GitHub repository with the template do one of the following. Create a new repository as shown in step 1 and select the template you would like to use. Or if using a public template, you can use the “Use this template” button on the repository page. As a result, you will have created your first GitHub repository!

Now that you have created your own template you can get started with reusing your own code to kickstart your projects! Have a template you would like to share with us? Let us know by sharing this post and mentioning us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn!

The post GitHub Template to Kickstart Your Project appeared first on ByteLion.

Client Spotlight: Using Statistical Testing to Validate a Product Idea for SpiralMath

Willam Forbes — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 20:42:53 +0000

Introduction to SpiralMath

SpiralMath is an EdTech startup based in the greater Baltimore region and a member of the Bytelion Analytics’ Business Intelligence Pilot Program cohort. SpiralMath is working on creating an instructional protocol and software package to help teachers present Common Core Mathematics in a way that improves student retention. With a year of pilot testing complete, the founding team from SpiralMath is working with Bytelion Analytics to validate their product is working effectively before making the necessary capital expenditures to expand.

The SpiralMath instructional protocol was developed by Joseph Mills, a career instructor and State Supervisor of Mathematics, utilizing five principles of learning psychology developed at Washington University, St Louis, where researchers have identified methods that improve student retention of new knowledge. To administer the protocol, students receive a daily five-question quiz that is completed, scored, and reviewed within a window of 45 minutes at the start of the day. Through intentional spaced repetition students build and affirm their knowledge of each concept over the course of the school year.

The Data

The Common Core State Standards is a list of skills that students are expected to master. Typically, each year of schooling evaluates students on 20 to 30 standards. For each standard, Joe Mills prepared some 20 questions (similar, not identical) that are used to assess the student’s mastery over time. When equivalent questions are repeated at increasing intervals, students’ long-term retention improves. This approach is known as Assessment for Learning.

Throughout the 2018-2019 school year, SpiralMath worked with a third-grade teacher at a Baltimore City Charter school to pilot the program and collect initial data for analysis. Over the course of the year, SpiralMath collected over 9,000 data points from a class of 25 students. For the purpose of this statistical examination, Bytelion Analytics utilized a data set that showed the daily average results of the class population sorted by Common Core standards. Since the number of questions varied from standard to standard, our team took a sample of the standards that have been assessed at least 10 times. This provided us a sample data set that included 110 total data points spanning the results of 11 standards.

Statistical Testing

For our statistical testing, we began by identifying our research question: Will the SpiralMath Protocol lead to an improvement in test scores? To answer this question, we identified our null hypothesis: the SpiralMath Protocol does not lead to an improvement in the test scores of the class population. A key guiding principle for our testing was that we were looking to see whether the difference between each assessment instance and the first assessment was significant, i.e. was the difference between the 2nd assessment and the 1st an improvement and statistically significant, etc. A t-test is the testing procedure for significance between two populations was selected; it compares the difference between means and dictates whether the null hypothesis should be accepted or rejected.

Overview of Results

At surface level, there was an improvement in the testing population from the 2nd assessment. This trend continued to show positive results as the number of assessments continued; however, results from the protocol became significant from the 7th assessment and onwards. We are able to conclude, with a 95% level of confidence, that the SpiralMath’s protocol helps students retain information in 7 administrations of their assessment, agnostic to the testing interval.

Graphic One: The class averages are shown over the course of the 10 assessments.

Graphic Two: The results of the t-test display that from the seventh assessment onwards the improvements were significant to the testing population.

What is next for SpiralMath?

The results of this product validation are just the beginning for SpiralMath. Although our quick and simple method, by definition, provides us 95% confidence in our results horizon, there are many other variables to test in order to better understand what actually drives the retention of information for the members of the classroom. SpiralMath will begin phase two of pilot testing with an emphasis on validating the success horizon and understanding the relationship between variables, such as question formatting, length of the spacing interval, and the number of test questions, in their protocol to create an algorithmic administrative process.

A special thanks to the leadership team at SpiralMath – Joe Mills and David Robson, for joining the Business Intelligence Pilot Program cohort! To learn more about SpiralMath and enrollment information for their ongoing pilot program please visit their website: www.spiralmath.net. If you would like to explore how we can leverage analytics and business intelligence to help you achieve the goals of your business, please reach out to Sidd Chhabra, Business Intelligence Lead, at sidd.chhabra@bytelion.com or read more at www.bytelion.com.

The post Client Spotlight: Using Statistical Testing to Validate a Product Idea for SpiralMath appeared first on ByteLion.