Litmus blog

Integration seminar in Cambridge, MA

2009-10-08T17:31:24Z

On Monday, 2nd November we're hosting an integration seminar for anyone interested in re-selling our testing tools.

We already work with over 50 email service providers and marketing/design agencies from around the world, but we'd love to partner with even more.

We’ll give you an overview of Litmus, and show you how you can integrate Litmus' tools within your own products. We'll also give you a preview of the features that are coming soon. There will be plenty of time to ask questions, and to meet our account manager and technical staff.

It'll be held at our US office, in Cambridge, MA. For full details, and to register, visit the event website. If you have any questions please contact Paul Farnell.

If you're able to join us I very much look forward to seeing you there!

Register free today

Our new US office

2009-09-10T12:44:07Z

We just opened a US office for Litmus in Cambridge, MA. Whilst our main office will remain in Leeds, UK, we're excited to be expanding to the US, and working with new partners here to get Litmus into the hands of as many designers as possible!

We're based at the Cambridge Innovation Center, on Kendall Square. It's a fantastic location, and we're surrounded by hundreds of other technology companies and startups.

Anyone who's interested in Litmus is most welcome to stop by. I'd love to meet you, just drop me an email.

Over the coming months, people from Litmus will be at the Business of Software conference in San Francisco; StackOverflow DevDays in Boston and London, and SXSW in Austin. Hopefully we'll meet more of you at these events, too!

(My thanks to Jason Robb for the CIC photo above)

Alkaline 2.0: Test emails on your Mac

2009-08-26T18:44:55Z

Today we've released Alkaline 2.0. Alkaline is our Mac OS X application that lets you use Litmus from right on your desktop.

The biggest change in this version is support for email testing. You can now test your email templates using Alkaline. It's really smooth. Grab an HTML file from your local machine and Alkaline will upload it to Litmus to be tested across up to 19 different email clients.

You can even ask Alkaline to automatically bring your email template's CSS inline before testing. Doing this drastically improves the compatibility of your template on Outlook 2007 and Gmail.

Alkaline remains completely free to download, and you can even use it with a free Litmus account to test on only Gmail and Outlook 2003. Sign up for a paid Litmus account and you'll get access to all 19 email clients and 24 web browsers.

Our thanks to Shiny Development for their fantastic work on this release!

Doctype launches

2009-08-11T22:06:44Z

Today we brought our new site, Doctype, out of private beta. Doctype is a new - free - question and answer site for web designers. If you've ever struggled with a CSS problem when designing a website or email template, you'll love Doctype.

Litmus can help you find compatibility problems. Doctype can help you solve them.

We've got a few neat features that make Doctype better than other CSS sites and mailing lists...

Each question has browser (or email) compatibility screenshots
All content on Doctype is editable so it's always up-to-date
You vote on answers so the best ones rise to the top
All CSS and HTML code is archived, along with the screenshots

Here's a great example of a question, so you can see how it works.

Once you create an account you can begin earning reputation. Your reputation score is the heart of your account on Doctype. To earn a great reputation, just write great answers to other people's questions. As people vote on your answers, you'll get points. A higher reputation means you can do more on Doctype, like editing other people's answers.

At the moment we don't know exactly how Doctype will evolve. Rest assured we'll be watching and participating every step of the way, and will work to make Doctype the single best resource for solving CSS problems on the web.

It's going to be an exciting journey. I hope you'll join us.

Why does anyone still use IE6?

2009-07-15T08:34:12Z

Digg recently ran a survey of their remaining IE6 users. The results are fascinating. The main reason people still use IE6 is because they have no choice.

Source: Digg IE6 survey

As you can see from Digg's survey results, 76% of people aren't able to upgrade from IE6 because of restrictions beyond their control. That doesn't bode well for web designers. It seems likely these people's situations will not change any time soon.

Digg are taking an interesting route with their IE6 support in future. For IE6 users they're making it possible to view content on their site, but not to interact with it. So you can read the stories, but not log in, vote, comment, and so on.

This isn't dissimilar to how we handle IE6 support within Litmus. We don't actively test our application on IE6, but we do make sure that published test results are viewable on IE6. Our thinking is that there are no professional web designers using IE6, so there's no reason our application needs to be perfectly compatible. However it is somewhat likely that designers' clients may be using IE6, and therefore any published test results need to be compatible with IE6.

Perhaps you can cut down on the functionality offered to IE6 users on your site, but still allow them to access the most important content?

Calling all web designers

2009-07-08T15:59:38Z

We've kept this under wraps for a while now, but we're working on a new site.

It's called Doctype. It's a question and answer site for web designers. If you've ever struggled to solve a compatibility problem with a website or email design, this site will save you time. And it's completely free.

I'll talk about it in more detail when we're closer to launch. In the meantime, we're looking for web designers to join the Doctype private beta. If you're interested, sign up here and we'll hook you up with an invite.

What should we build next?

2009-07-06T11:30:43Z

Today we're launching a feedback forum for Litmus. It's your chance to tell us what features you'd like us to build next. You can vote for the ideas you like the best, so the ones that are most frequently requested rise to the top of the list.

We currently do this internally, based upon feature requests we receive by email, but I think it will be good to try doing it publicly instead. We'll be watching the site closely and it will definitely guide our development priorities.

What's the one thing you really wish Litmus would let you do? Go ahead and suggest it!

A login experiment

2009-06-28T12:16:12Z

Following on from a blog post by Jakob Nielsen about the usability of password fields, and a follow up by Bruce Schneier we decided to have a little experiment with the Litmus login page.

We realised that whenever we get the option to unmask a password while entering one in everyday desktop apps (specifically Mac OS X) we normally do it. We thought it'd be worth giving this a go on Litmus.

From now on you'll be able to mask or unmask your password while logging into Litmus, by default we'll keep it masked but feel free to uncheck the box if you'd like to see exactly what you are entering. In order to trigger browser password saving functionality our javascript flips the field back to a password before submitting.

Happy 4th Birthday

2009-06-07T20:12:29Z

Today Litmus is four years old. We launched the service (then called SiteVista), on June 7, 2005.

That feels like a very long time ago now. When we first started it was just David and I working part time, whilst doing freelance work. Now we're a team of six.

My thanks to all our customers who've made this possible. We love what we do and are committed to building the best testing tools in the world.

Here's to the next four years!

Automated email testing with a desktop application

2009-05-26T13:45:48Z

Geert De Laet recently contacted me to tell me about a desktop application he built. It helps his designers test their emails more efficiently using Litmus. Geert works for LUON, a company in Belgium with an email marketing product called EmailGarage. Here's a screenshot of Geert's application:

The designers at LUON were put off testing their emails early in the design process because they'd need to upload the images and HTML for their templates first.

"This led to the fact that the emails were only tested last minute when everything was put in order to actually send the email," Geert told me, "and we have a couple of Litmus accounts, which made it even more difficult for the designers."

Geert set up a network drive—accessible from the web—where the designers can copy/paste their email designs into a folder. His desktop application asks for their HTML file, then automatically changes the image references inside it. Finally, it displays a preview of the email and sends it to the correct Litmus account.

The application uses the static email addresses for LUON's Litmus accounts to send in the email test to Litmus, making it a very straightforward integration project.

He has plans to streamline the process even further, eliminating the manual copying of files and instead uploading automatically to a cloud storage service. "Another thing I'd possibly add is a check on the weight of the email, so I can make sure the designers have optimised their images!"

My thanks to Geert for sharing details of his application with us. If you've built something with Litmus I'd be fascinated to hear about it.

Email, Twitter and IM notifications

2009-05-20T12:55:35Z

Wouldn't it be nice to set your email or browser test running, then be alerted the moment it's finished? From today, Litmus can send you these notifications by email, Twitter, Gtalk or AIM.

To set up your notifications, just start a new test in your Litmus account. Once your test is processing you'll be offered a link to configure your notifications:

This follows nicely from my previous post about setting expectations. By being able to get on with other tasks whilst your test is processed, it feels quicker because you're being more productive with your time.

This feature works particularly well if you're using a static email test address. First set up your email notifications, then send us the newsletter to be tested (to your static address). As soon as your results are ready, you'll get an email back with a direct link to view them. It's much simpler than visiting your account to hunt down the results.

If you're building your own web applications, you might be interested to know that we're using MessagePub for our Gtalk and AIM notifications. They have a great API that makes it easy to start sending custom IM alerts without needing to maintain your own bots.

A hint of what's to come

2009-05-20T09:59:25Z

Last week we received our first batch of iPod Touch devices.

Our current development focus is on launching a comprehensive range of mobile devices, for both email and browser testing.

We can't give an exact date for the launch just yet, but these iPod Touches will be being shipped to the data centre soon!

Automating Litmus tests at Yahoo!

2009-05-19T09:57:29Z

Tyler Hall wrote to tell us how his team at Yahoo! is using Litmus as part of their deployment process. I think it's a fascinating example of how to use Litmus. Note that it is fairly technical and involves some manual configuration, though.

Tyler's PHP script (which is available on GitHub) automates the process of starting a browser test on Litmus. He's set this up as a deployment task in Capistrano, which they're using to deploy their site to their staging and production environments.

Each time they deploy a new version of their site, their script triggers a Litmus test of their pages, using the A-grade browsers recommended by Yahoo.

He explains that these automated tests are useful for a number of reasons...

It starts the test faster, so by the time we get around to checking the results, they're complete or nearly done.

Perhaps more importantly, this provides a visual history of our changes. All of our code is in SVN, of course, but SVN doesn't help when your boss asks "when did that background color change?" or "are you sure the site was working on April 23rd?". Having a log of what our sites looked like for each revision/push is invaluable.

We use SVN and Capistrano at Litmus to deploy our site, so I'm going to use this script to save myself time when we make design changes.

My thanks to Tyler for sharing the script and his process for testing at Yahoo. If anyone else has any interesting ways they're using Litmus please email me or leave a comment here. I'd love to hear about them.

Setting expectations

2009-05-05T13:08:10Z

Today we've rolled out a new feature that shows how long your test will take to complete. It's a simple addition to the user interface, but behind the scenes it's taking live statistical data and adapting it to the specific options you've chosen for your test.

It's part of something we've been thinking a lot about recently: setting expectations. We've found that under different conditions people have very different expectations. By setting these expectations correctly software can feel faster to the user, even if it's not.

Expectations for a web application

When you start a test using Litmus, it can take a few minutes to complete. Considering everything that's happening in the background, (your email being sent, our servers loading your email, generating screenshots, uploading...) a few minutes is pretty quick for that to happen 15+ times. But if you're simply sitting watching the results screen, even a few minutes can feel like a long wait. A watched pot never boils.

Think about other web applications you've used—rarely would you need to wait that long. As a result, we sometimes get feedback from new users that Litmus feels slow. After their first few tests our users begin to adjust their expectations, but it's that first time experience we wanted to improve.

Expectations for a desktop application

This issue became even more intriguing when we launched Alkaline. Alkaline is a Mac desktop client for Litmus. The user is doing the same task (submitting a test and waiting for the results). The task takes the same time. Yet we got way more feedback that it was slow. Even when their test was completed in less than a minute, some people would still complain it was too slow.

Setting realistic expectations

From this feedback, we learnt that people don't expect a web app to take more than a few moments to perform a task, and that people expect tasks in a desktop app to be almost instantaneous.

For us that's a problem. We're constantly trimming down our test times with system improvements and additional capacity, but our tests will never complete instantly. So, we're now beginning to set people's expectations better with small interface improvements like this one. The next version of Alkaline will address this too.

If you're working on your own products, it's worth considering if you need to manage your users' expectations—especially if it's not obvious how long a task will take.

Introducing Jonathan

2009-04-08T14:40:51Z

Last week there was a new addition to our team here at Litmus. Jonathan Powell has joined us to work on our back end testing system.

As we continue to grow, it's fantastic to have an extra pair of hands to help us build new features even faster. You'll see the first results of Jonathan's work in the next few weeks and I think you'll be delighted with what he's added.

Welcome to Litmus, Jonathan, it's great to have you on board!