Coffeeshopped

Lessons Learned from 3 Weeks of Using KISSinsights

Chadwick Wood — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:26:35 +0000

A few weeks ago, I decided to give KISSinsights a try on the Coffeeshopped website; I had recently read Neil Patel's article "What I learned about you through KISSinsights", and it convinced me that there's probably a lot I can learn from asking my readers a few questions. I have the free account with them, so I wasn't able to make up my own questions, but they have some built-in questions that seemed appropriate. So, over 3 weeks, I tried 3 different surveys... here are the results.

How would you rate this website's design?

About a month ago, I launched the latest design for the Coffeeshopped website, and so this seemed like a good first question to ask. I'm pretty happy with my design, but are the readers? I set up the survey so that it would only appear on 2 blog posts, both of which get a good chunk of my regular traffic. Picking these 2 posts also meant that most of the people seeing the survey would be coming from search engines (where most of my traffic comes from). I don't really know the significance of that fact. Anyway, over 7 days, the survey got 100 views, and a whopping 2 responses: 1 "satisfactory", and 1 "impressive".

So, what did I learn from this survey? First off, expect a low response rate. 2% is much lower than I expected, especially for a simple multiple choice question. As for what the typical reader thinks of my site design, well, I guess it's decent?

What should we write about next?

That first survey wasn't really going to give me much actionable feedback, though. Even if 100 people had deemed my design "unsatisfactory", what direction would that give me? So for my second survey, I decided I'd go for something really useful: blogging topics. I'm always coming up short for good topics to write about, so maybe readers had some for me.

This time, I went whole hog: I put the survey on every blog post on the website. I actually ran into a technical issue making this work, which I won't waste your time with, but I will say that my first email to KISSinsights support received no response after several days of waiting. I ended up sending a second email, to which I got a very prompt and helpful reply. Just saying.

So, this second survey ran for about 9 days, and what were the responses? Survey says:

This time around, the survey got 300 views. And 1 response. 1 response. A 0.3% response rate. Ouch. The one person who responded recommended that I write another article about Google Analytics filters, which I might do! But no one else had any ideas for me.

How long have you been a reader of this blog?

I knew that this final survey wasn't going to get seen much: this question only gets shown to repeat visitors to the site, and I'll be honest, I don't think I have many repeat readers (blogging more regularly would probably help that). But I figured, what the heck, let's see what happens. Again, I put the survey on every blog post. I didn't bother putting it on the home page, or product pages, etc., since they didn't seem applicable. Ok, so, responses:

... there weren't any! Ok, so it only got shown 21 times. But those were all repeat visitors! To my blog! And it was multiple choice! From this final survey I learned: it's really, really hard to get my visitors to answer a simple multiple choice question.

Final Thoughts

I have a hard time knowing what to make of this experiment. I guess it validated (to some extent) my assumptions that: 1. my website design doesn't totally suck, and 2. I don't have many repeat readers. But it didn't give me much to act upon.

Looking back at Neil Patel's blog post, I do notice that his overall response numbers are low: 49 and 147 responses for the survey that he shows numbers for. Google Reader tells me he's got over 4000 subscribers just on his RSS feed. I bet his response rate was just about as bad as mine!

So, I guess I learned more about surveys than I did about my website: to get meaningful data out of a survey like those that KISSinsights offers, you're probably going to need a lot of traffic. Otherwise, you're not going to have much data to reason with. I think that they have put together a really well-executed product. It looks great, it's simple to use, and it presents the data (that you can get) clearly. But at $29/month, I'd recommend giving the free account a whirl first; you might not have a site that their product can help.

If anyone has ideas/suggestions about how I could more effectively use these surveys, I'm all ears! Let's hear it in the comments.

What's in Store for Sphericle 3.0?

Chadwick Wood — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:50:48 +0000

I've been working on the concepts and design for Sphericle 3.0 lately, and I want to share some of what I have so far. The past versions of Sphericle have not been designed nearly as well as they could have; I rushed into development too early, and the game suffered for it. This time around, I want to make it very pretty, more intuitive, and more fun! Here's some of what I'm working on:

Search

The map is getting prettier. Now, players can upload a profile image, which will be shown when you encounter them on the map. Sphere icons are multi-colored, matching their "actual" color (later on I'll write an article about how I do the coloring dynamically). Also, you'll notice a Sign on the upper left of the map...

Signs

Notes are, most likely, over. Instead, now there are signs. Signs are like notes: a short bit of text that gets posted wherever you are when you write it. But signs don't move, or get picked up. They stay in place, for everyone around to read, and respond to. They also mark your territory. So now, there are two competitions: get the most spheres, and have the most territory. These two competitions play into each other, as well. Have you ever wished you had a safe place, to avoid getting your stash stolen? Just stay in your territory, and you're safe.

Scores

As I mentioned, there are now two competitions: get the most Spheres, and have the most Signs. Also, there will now be Local leaderboards, in addition to the Global leaderboard. Now you can see whether you're the leader in your area, even if you're not the best in the world (yet).

And More

One more aspect coming in the version of Sphericle is Pals (working title). When you encounter someone, you can ask them to be your pal. Why make pals? For one, pals don't steal from pals. If there's someone you've been wanting to call a truce with, become their pal. Also, when people who are aren't your pals come along, the more pals you have, the harder it will be for others to steal from you. Safety in numbers.

A lot of this is still in the concept phase. Please share any thoughts you have... I want to make the next version as fun and slick as possible.

Photoshop: Create an iPhone Google Map-style Shadow for Icons

Chadwick Wood — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 22:56:59 +0000

While working on the next release of Sphericle (which is going to be awesome), I've had to create new map icons for the Search screen in the app. I want these icons to have the same style of shadow as the Google Map pins do on the iPhone. So, after some experimentation, I found a pretty easy and accurate way to do that. Here's what we're starting with:

On the left, you can see the typical pin. On the right is an icon I'm working on, showing a player's profile picture. This is the icon we'll make a shadow for.

Duplicate and Merge Your Shadowed Object

First off, you want to create a flat copy of whatever you're making a shadow for. In this example, the icon is actually made up of several layers grouped together, so I select the Group, then "Duplicate Group", then "Merge Group". This results in a flattened copy of the icon.

Select the Group

Duplicate the Group

Merge the Group

Apply Layer Styles to Make a Shadow

No matter what the contents of your flattened icon copy are, you can use layer styles to make it into a shadow. In the Layers palette, double-click on the right side of the layer with your copy of the icon, which will open up the Layer Styles dialog box. Then, apply the following layer styles:

Blending Options: under "Advanced Blending" set "Fill Opacity" to 0%.
Color Overlay: set the Color to black (#000000), and the opacity to 25%.
Outer Glow:
- Blend mode: normal
- Opacity: 25%
- Color: black
- Spread: 0%
- Size: 3 px

Below are some pictures to aid you. Once you've done this, your copy of the icon should be a slightly blurry, semi-transparent gray version of the icon.

Blending Options

Color Overlay

Outer Glow

Transform the Shadow to Achieve the Right Perspective

The last thing to do is transform the shadow, then put it in the right place. So, select your icon copy and go to Edit -> Free Transform. We need to do two transformations:

Set the height to 50%. Make sure the width stays to 100%... we don't want to resize proportionally; we're intentionally warping the layer.
Set horizontal skew to -40 degrees. This is what gives the shadow the angled effect.

Click the check box to make your transformations final. The last steps are to move your shadow layer to line up with the icon it's shadowing. Just do this however looks right. Also, your shadow layer will probably be in front of the icon it's shadowing, so make sure you swap the order of those layers, so that the shadow is behind.

Here's our final product. It's a pretty close copy of the built-in iPhone effect!

I was hoping to write a script to automate this whole process, but I'm using Photoshop CS3, and it doesn't look like you can script layer styles. So, that will have to wait. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. And if this tutorial helped you, do me a favor and check out Sphericle. Thanks!

Coffeeshopped on The ATX Web Show

Chadwick Wood — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:37:27 +0000

Today, Dave Rupert released the 17th episode of The ATX Web Show podcast, and I'm pleased to announce that it features me! His podcast is a great rounding up of what's going on in the Austin web scene, and I'm honored to be a guest. Check it out!

Cafe Bedouins

Chadwick Wood — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:12:43 +0000

This past Tuesday I attended my first Cafe Bedouins meeting, which usually takes place at a coffeeshop, but this one was at Cospace. Cafe Bedouins is basically an open weekly space for tech people to work on their side projects... it's supposed to provide a kind of regular space for projects that otherwise might never get those spare hours they need. It was also my first time going to any web/tech social event, at all.

Having freelanced for several years now, and having friends who are mostly not tech people, an event like this was a really refreshing experience for me. Going to Cafe Bedouins, I was surrounded by a bunch of people with whom I could talk about web application frameworks, the latest is database server trends, and whatever else the big geek in me thinks about for several hours every day; something I needed more than I realized, perhaps.

So, this is to say, I'm going to be doing more of this! If any of you readers have other Austin tech meetups you know about, please let me know. It's time for Coffeeshopped to get more social. And, if you haven't been to Cafe Bedouins yet, and you have any ideas or side projects and could use a good community to motivate you, or just to shoot the shit with, you should check out their website, and come meet up some Tuesday. It's a good group of folks.