Balsamiq Blog

Tracking your Company’s Mentions with Del.icio.us

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 20th, 2009 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 7 Comments

Hello friends!

Today I’d like to share a little Del.icio.us trick that might be useful for your company. It’s something I saw used at Atlassian and that I’ve been using extensively ever since starting Balsamiq.

An intro to del.icio.us

Most everyone knows what delicious (or del.icio.us) is by now (Wikipedia entry). The bookmark-in-the-cloud service was revolutionary in many ways, it was one of the first social web applications, before “social media” was even a term.

Here’s a screenshot of a user’s page (click to enlarge):

In essence, delicious lets you save your bookmarks on an account on the delicious (now Yahoo) servers, and “tag them” with keywords for easier searching later on.

This alone is very useful, as it lets you access your same bookmarks from any computer, or even just different browsers on the same computer. The tag system helps you find old links quickly, which is extremely useful as we collect more and more bookmarks over the years.

I suspect the vast majority of delicious users only use the service this way, blissfully ignorant of how their own personal use contributes to the larger, social aspect of the tool.

The thing is, by default everyone’s bookmark lists and associated tags are publicly accessible by anyone. Ha!

Seeing other people’s bookmarks

So for instance you can go to delicious.com/garyvee to see all of the bookmarks Gary Vaynerchuck has ever saved there, or delicious.com/joshua to see what the creator of del.icio.us is bookmarking these days.

You can even “refine your search” by going to delicious.com/joshua/food to see every bookmark related to food bookmarked by Joshua Schachter.

This automatic-sharing and easy-filtering is pretty powerful, especially if you consider that those pages have RSS feeds associated with them. Want to be notified whenever Joshua finds another food-related link? Just subscribe to the RSS feed for the page above – an easy way to follow what your heroes deem worthy of bookmarking.

Another page you can go on is delicious.com/popular, to see what people are bookmarking today. A great way to find what the world thinks “the best of the Internet” is today…I suspect many journalists watch this page. But I digress…

Searching by Tag

Just like you can search a user’s bookmarks, you can also search bookmarks by tag. So for instance if you go to delicious.com/tag/scuba, you’ll see a list of links that people find interesting about it, sortable by “most recent” and “most popular”, each sorted view with an RSS feed for it.

The Problem: Organizing Your Company Press Mentions

Say your team created a product, or a web app, or what-have-you. Obviously you’ll want to keep tabs on when your product is mentioned on the web. Using RSS coupled with search results is a great way to do it, which I describe in this old blog post.

Now the problem is: as you collect new mentions of your product on your feed reader, how do you categorize them, save them for posterity and share the categorized list with your colleagues and the world? Also, if there are a few of you in charge of keeping track of these mentions, how do you make sure the categorized list doesn’t have duplicates? Doing it manually, even on a wiki page, is enormously time-consuming. Believe me, I tried it.

This is where del.icio.us can step in to help.

The Trick

The trick to make it all work is simple: as you start collecting links about whatever you’re tracking, add them all to delicious, using a tagging system you have internally agreed upon.

For instance, look at this page: http://delicious.com/tag/atlassian_press

I saw a browser open to that page with the corner of my eye on my first visit to Atlassian, and it immediately made me realize how awesome they are as a company.

See, all they had to do was to tell every employee: “if you see a mention of Atlassian anywhere on the web, add it to delicious with the atlassian_press tag”.

Brilliantly simple to explain, to remember and to do.

The cool thing is that as people do that, delicious adds all the links to the page above, automatically collating it into a single list without duplicates – instead, it shows how many people bookmarked that same link, giving you an indication of how popular that particular link was (useful if you want to advertise on that particular blog for instance, or even just thank the blogger/journalist who wrote the piece).

Additionally, you can see the number of bookmarks on the list at any time (including when you add a new tag), which can be useful sometimes (you could even track this over time!).

But wait, there’s more! The page above is completely public! Not only non-employees can see it, but can contribute to it as well! For instance, I have been adding links to the delicious.com/tag/napkee_press page as I come across mention of Mockups’ perfect companion on the web.

Using a public service to maintain that list also speaks volumes about what kind of company you are: you’re telling the world: “here’s what the Internet thinks about us, feel free to make your own opinion of our company by reading it.”

Open, confident, honest. Brilliant.

Wait, how can you be sure that the list is complete and not censored? A company might decide to only tag good reviews, ignoring the bad press. The short answer is “you can’t”, but remember that anyone can contribute to the list, and the effort required to police it would far outweigh the benefits of using delicious this way. Plus, a Google, Google Blog, Google News or Twitter search for the same company is just a few clicks away!

In other words, since you can’t hide anything on the Internet these days, why even try? I love it love it love it.

Needless to say, I have embraced this practice entirely, and now use a number of tags for each mention of Balsamiq I find on the web.

Our Delicious Tag Lists

Here are the tags we use for bookmarking Balsamiq press, and how we use them.

balsamiq_press (3,263 links at time of writing): this is the “catch-all” tag, the comprehensive list. Every time see something about Balsamiq, I bookmark it with this tag, usually along with one of the tags below. I try to tag everything, the good and the bad. The only thing I do not tag is warez sites offering cracked copy of the software. Sorry, but I’m not going to help you find those…

balsamiq_reviews (1,554 links): any time I see a review of Mockups, I use this tag. I also use it if the link is not a full-blown review but it contains a sentence or more about the product…as long as the author expresses an opinion on the product.

balsamiq_comments (219 links): if I see a mention of Balsamiq as a comment to a blog, or on Friendfeed, digg, Hacker News or any other “forum-like” website, I use this tag instead of the balsamiq_reviews tag.

balsamiq_love (135 links): I reserve this tag for those mentions that shower us with love. The goal here is to keep a list from which to cull customer quotes to use on this website. These quotes are better than ones received via email, as you don’t need to ask permission to use them – it’s already public knowledge!

balsamiq_tweets (1,039 links): when we first started, I bookmarked every Tweet about Mockups with this tag. It soon became too time-consuming, so I now only use this tag for those tweets that say very nice things about us, something to add to our Twitter background in the future. Instead of sending people to that list, I now just send people to this Twitter search result page directly. Somewhat related, we also maintain a Twitter list of all the wireframing-tools on the market, so that people can get an unfiltered sense for the whole space we’re in.

balsamiq_puzzle (24 links): I’ll write about this “puzzle” thing in another post. It’s basically articles that are about stuff we do that’s not related to our core competency. Just know that we’re trying to earn as many as these kind of links as possible.

balsamiq_sightings (28 links): I use this one whenever I come across something that was made with Mockups, even if they don’t mention it. I love to spot these! If you come across any and have the time, add it to delicious with balsamiq_sightings, ok? Thanks!

balsamiq_videos (9 links): I use this tag for those reviews that include screencasts, or for our own videos.

balsamiq_jobs (10 links): apparently knowing how to use Mockups has become an requirement for some jobs, which I find amusing because Mockups takes about 5 minutes to learn, or so we hear This is a cool list for you to keep tabs on in case you’re a Mockups expert and are looking for a job!

In Conclusion

The beauty of having the lists above is that they can be used on many different occasions. For instance, we link to the balsamiq_love and balsamiq_press lists straight from our testimonials page. We also show the RSS from the balsamiq_reviews page on the side-bar of our blog.

I also recently added the RSS feed for balsamiq_press to our OPML file, so if you’re interested in keeping track with our own output as well as what the Internet says about us (hi mom!), you can now get it all in one convenient package.

To wrap it up: we’ve been very happy with this little delicious trick and continue to find new uses and benefits from it all the time. We recommend it!

What do you think? Do you do something similar? How do you track your product’s mentions?

Big shout-out to Laura Khalil at Atlassian for inadvertently showing this to me.

Peace!
Peldi

— 7 Comments

 

 

 

Holiday Reading: Free eBooks and Good Blogs

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 19th, 2009 under Books, Links — 4 Comments

Hello again!

‘Tis the season of giving, and hopefully most of you will have a little more time to do some reading, so I thought this would be a good time to share the following links with you.

Free eBooks

In the last few months we’ve seen a bunch of good free eBooks come out. I’m not sure how this trend started, but I suspect this TechZingLive interview with Jason Cohen might have something to do with it.

Here are four eBooks I think you might like, which are all free:

• “Don’t Just Roll The Dice – A usefully short guide on software pricing” by Neil Davidson
• “Building the Perfect Beast: The Igor Naming Guide to Creating Product and Company Names” by Igor
• “What Matters Now” a collection of one-page nuggets of wisdom collected by Seth Godin
• “The Fable of User-Centered Design” by UserFocus

Do you know any other good eBooks along these lines? Don’t be shy and post the links in the comments if you do!

My favorite non-tech blogs

I follow A LOT of blogs, mostly tech and business stuff. It’s all good and useful, but the echo-chamber makes me a bit queasy after a while.

That’s when I like to look at these:

• Letters of Note – these are always entertaining
• Today and Tomorrow – crazy digital art, designy furniture and artsy animated GIFs (remember those?)
• Strange Maps – for map nerds like me
• The Big Picture on boston.com. A view of our World through gorgeous, always though-provoking pictures
• Indexed – I just started following this one recently. Very smart stuff, plus I have a soft spot for hand-drawn things
• Minimal – not at the same level of the ones above, but quick to read

What are your favorite “escape from the technosphere” blogs?

Have a great holiday break everyone, happy reading!

Peldi

— 4 Comments

 

 

 

An apology

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 17th, 2009 under Company / Business, Mockups — 13 Comments

Hi friends.

So I made a big mistake today. No, I made a few. I was so excited about the new pan feature that I decided to release it without testing it properly.

Not only, I also ran out the door right after the build was live to run some errands (I already hated Christmas shopping before, now I REALLY hate it).

Anyways, I ran back as soon as I saw your emails, comments and GetSatisfaction posts on the iPhone, but it took a while because of…you guessed it…Christmas shopping traffic.

As soon as I got home, here’s what I did to fight the fire I set under my own butt:

• rolled back the bad build
• Val helped me tell everyone about the rollback, while I found and fixed the build (it was something really stupid)
• I’m writing this blog post while eating humble pie (tasty!)

Anyways, the new build with the fix will be live by the time I finish writing this, I’ll update the post when it’s ready.

In the meantime, I’d like to apologize to all of you who were affected by this bug. You’re our early adopters, our best customers, we NEED you, and upsetting you like this hurts me in the stomach. I truly am sorry for this 2-hour mess-up.

I will also apologize to Valerie, Marco and Mariah for putting them in this little mess.

It might be a small consolation, but I’d like to offer any of you who installed 1.6.55 a free license of Mockups for Desktop to give away to someone for Christmas (I hear it makes for a great present for the in-laws).

Just send me an email venting about how I messed up your day today (I deserve it), and I’ll send you a Mockups for Desktop key, no questions asked. peldi@balsamiq.com

Ok, let me go check on the new build…

Peldi

UPDATE: 1.6.56 is live and looks good.

— 13 Comments

 

 

 

Mid-Week Release: finishing up Zoom

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 17th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 12 Comments

New Update (5:49pm CET): we have fixed the bug and issued an apology you might be interested in (there’s a little surprise for you there)

Update (5:16pm CET): the new build was seriously broken. We have posted the previous version here if you need to roll back. A new build with the fix is coming right up. Also writing a blog post apology.

Hey. We just posted a new version of Mockups that “finishes” the zoom feature we released two days ago.

Here’s what’s new:

• in Mockups on Desktop: the zoom and scroll position is remembered for each tab. Thanks so much Ben Gillbanks for starting the discussion on this and to everyone else who chimed in! As a side effect, this took care of this year-old bug report by Michael Bourque! It might take us a little while, but we get to things!
• we added the ability to pan! Just hold down space and drag around to navigate your mockup easily
• we also added the ability to zoom in and out with CTRL+scrollwheel: up to zoom in, down to zoom out. Thanks to those who asked for it!

Who do we think we are, Photoshop?

There might still some bugs, so keep reporting them and we’ll fix them all up, yay!

How do I upgrade?

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Mockups for FogBugz: here (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
• Web Demo: here

Onward!

— 12 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Zoom Zoom!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 15th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 5 Comments

I forget who told me that you should always hire people who are smarter than you, but boy am I thankful for the advice!

I knew Marco was smarter than me pretty soon after I met him. His work on the Zoom feature, which we’re releasing today, proved it once again.

So let’s get to it!

Zoom, or how did we ever live without it for so long?

As all good UIs should be, zoom is nearly invisible. There are a few new menu items in the View menu, there’s a new zoom icon on the toolbar (with a special hover effect we came up with – try it!) and most importantly there are new keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out.

Other than that, the feature should “just work”, allowing you to work at “the right zoom level to get the job done”.

The keyboard shortcuts to remember are (as always, substitute CTRL with APPLE on the mac):

• CTRL + +, zoom in
• CTRL + -, zoom out
• CTRL + 0, zoom to fit (this is good to get a bird’s-eye view of your mockup)
• CTRL + 1, zoom to Actual size (100%, 1:1)

We are VERY pleased with the feature, and would love to hear your thoughts on it. As with all new features, there is room for improvement and some rough edges, but with your help we’ll make it better every week. Stay with us!

For example, we’ll add the “pan” feature soon, as the two go hand-in-hand.

One thing we had to do was to change the keyboard shortcuts for growing and shrinking text because they were conflicting (and zoom is more important). You now have to also hold ALT down together with the shortcuts above to change the font size. We don’t like to change things like this but we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it in this case.

Many many thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the GetSatisfaction thread about the feature and helped us test it: tomr, Michael, Laszlo, Adam, Gareth, Justin, Luke, Jeff, Rob, Dan, Milhaus, Regis, Jim, Jenni, Chris, Steve, Andi, lewen7er9, Jon, Luc, Ben, Aaron, this one’s for you.

Canvas Border Styles and Color

We added two more border styles to the Canvas / Rectangle control, as well as support for border color.

Many thanks to Jenni Merrifield for the eloquent and very convincing feature request, and to Duke and Laurent for pushing us to make it as good as it could be.

Other Improvements

Added linking support for Trees, Menus and List controls. One link per line, simple as that.

UI Library Filters: Thanks to feedback from Justin Vincent of TechZing and now TweetMiner fame, and to fschaap, we realized that the way we had changed the behavior of the UI Library filters last week was not optimal. We made a change to fix it: now clicking on a button will switch the filter to that button, but holding SHIFT while clicking will add to the current filter. It’s easier to try than explain, and don’t worry about remembering this since it’s in the tooltip as well.

PDF Export: Fixed a bug in PDF export that had to do with BMML files with dots in their names. Sorry it took a while, this was a 5-minute fix! Thanks to Chris Mears and others for reporting it.

During the week we also fixed a bug with going full-screen when the inspector was docked, which would pretty much break everything. Thanks to essepi and others for reporting it, we fixed it in 1.6.50.

Improved the looks of the Geometric Shape controls and of the Image placeholder a bit more. Sorry it’s taking me so many iterations to get it right, it’s not that hard but I guess I was going too fast before.

How do I upgrade?

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Mockups for FogBugz: here (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
• Web Demo: here

On a personal note, I’m starting to really like the app, it’s getting there…

What’s next?

Here’s what’s cooking right now:

• sortable tabs for the Desktop version
• a way to take a snapshot of a web page from within the app (only in the Desktop version for now)
• a new cleaner but still sketchy skin: designer friends, we’ll need your help with this one, it’s gotta be GOOD, “Andy-Budd good“.
• web app private beta members: we plan to push a new build with RTC and tons of other improvements before Christmas.

Onward!

— 5 Comments

 

 

 

Weekly Release: Big UI Library Improvements

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 9th, 2009 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 6 Comments

Hello everyone!

We finally had some time to tackle one of the big features that many of you have been asking for, the “UI Library Position” feature.

As usual, it was a true group effort, just look at all the great ideas that were shared on this long GetSatisfaction thread about it! Rainwebs, Gaving Jolly, Tobias Tappel, Troy King, Lalomi, Thomas Schaaf, RedMike, A.J.Kandy, Sue Anderson, DJ EJ, Regis, Alanc, jrseney, Ben Kopf, Paul Muston, applennevaux, Cristian Pascu and Andi, we thank thee!

We truly are blessed to be part of the user community that has formed around Mockups, you guys are the best, we’re so glad to be helping YOU make this app better and better.

OK so I recorded a little 4-minute screencast of the new features:

In short:

• You can now place the UI Library on the right or on the left of your screen (not just on top like before). The position you choose will be remembered across restarts.
• You can now dock the Property Inspector (only when the UI Library is on the left or the right).
• You can now combine filters for the UI Library controls that are shown in the UI Library.
• The filters are remembered across restarts.

We are happy with the changes, and hope you will be too!

Let us know what you think, especially after using it for a while.

This feature is available on all versions of Mockups.

What else is new?

• We improved how some of the geometric shape controls look when you stretch them out. Thanks Andi for bringing this up!

• We improved the look of the app’s scrollbars a little (they look less flex-like)
• We increased the size of the font size combobox pulldown so that you no longer have to scroll. Thank you Tobias for reporting it
  
  Also don’t forget that you can use CTRL+= and CTRL+- (or APPLE+= and APPLE+-) to resize the text incrementally without using the mouse at all. Also CTRL+0 to get back to the default size.
• You can now disable text throughout the app by using -this notation-, just like *this* will make something bold, [this] will make it a link and _this_ will make it underlined. Thanks to Mark Henderson for requesting it and to Erika Cooper, Andi  and applennevaux for convincing me to do it!

How do I upgrade?

• Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
• Mockups for Confluence: here
• Mockups for JIRA: here
• Mockups for XWiki: here
• Mockups for FogBugz: here (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
• Web Demo: here

What else is cooking?

Well, we continue to be focused on improving the web app, which I’d say is almost screencast-ready. Please do not email us asking to be in the beta, we are not accepting new members at the moment. Just stay tuned here for when we decide to open it up again or go live with it!

Aside from the web app and customer support, we are working on 3 exciting and highly-requested features:

• Zoom. Yes, zoom!
• in Mockups for Desktop, the ability to rearrange the order of the tabs at the bottom via drag and drop!
• a new, cleaner and a touch more serious, but still sketch-like skin

These are not easy features, so don’t expect them all next week, but know that we’re actively working on them. I’m sure we’ll need your help in order to make them as good as they can be, so stay tuned here and on Twitter!

Our little app is maturing, yay!

Onward!

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

Guest Post: The Product Group

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 9th, 2009 under Customer Stories, Mockups — No Comment

Hi everyone! The following is a guest-post by Jeremy Horn, organizer of The Product Group, a meet-up for Product Managers based in New York City. The group is currently composed of 84 members who are devoted to excellence in all aspects of Product Management, Strategy, Experience, etc.

Since Balsamiq Mockups was originally designed as a way to enable Product Managers to participate in the wireframing process we were happy to offer Jeremy our support via a discount code for the group’s members and some exposure on our little blog. Plus they had such nice things to say about us!

The following is a quick recap of their latest meet-up. Sounds like a fun and productive time!

A very big thank you to everyone who made it to our most recent meet-up of The Product Group, as well as to our very special sponsor, Balsamiq Studios!

We all had a blast discussing Product People-oriented topics and enjoying Wonderful food.

In our latest meet-up we discussed…

Product Positioning: from the ‘what’ to the ‘when’ and ‘why’

Event Planning Product: brainstorming solutions to the chicken-or-egg problem of a real-world startup product with the founder

Credibility Online: from establishing to maintaining

… and more …

We also frequently discuss methods of wireframing and storyboarding our products, and I asked those who could, to share their experiences with Balsamiq Mockups.

The Product Group’s, Product Person, Ilya Blokh said…

Balsamiq has quickly become an essential tool for me as a PM.  I recently started at a new position and was tasked with creating a series of mockups on the first day, which I would be presenting to various groups throughout the company during the week.  I had never worked with Balsamiq before, but it was the only tool available to me at the time.  The fact that it took about 10 minutes to figure out the application and maybe another 30 to get my process completely nailed down meant that I had a series of clear, constructive mockups by the end of the day.  The ease of use combined with the clear visual style – one that shows enough substance to get my point across, but is clearly distinct from the finished design – mean not only that I can quickly iterate on interface design on my own, but that others can have a go if they want, without being intimidated by the software.

The Product Group’s, Product Person, Janey Wong said…

My experience with Balsamiq Mockups have been excellent. It’s intuitive and so simple to use – making wireframes creation and explaining the vision of a webpage or website to clients, designers and developers so much easier.  Balsalmiq Mockups cuts a lot of time trying to organize, size and create different webpage elements.  I feel much more efficient and definitely less frustrated when I have to put wireframes together and quickly. The only thing that is missing that would be nice to have in this application is the ability to create flow charts so I can also draft an overview of the website architecture and how various users would navigate through it.

The Product Group meet-ups are an opportunity for Product People (managers, strategies, marketers, etc.) to come together to meet, interact, and network in a roundtable setting.

It’s awesome to meet fellow Product People in a laid-back, conversational gathering like this one and I am looking forward to seeing everyone, new and familiar, at our next meet-up …

Thursday, January 7th @ 7PM
@ Wonderful @ 172 8th Avenue (bet. 18th and 19th St)
NYC

If you would like to attend our next meet-up, RSVP today or visit our group webpage at…

http://tpgblog.com/TheProductGroup

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

Do you also host or participate in a meet-up with fellow UX lovers? Get in touch, we’d love to support your effort to delight your customers. Remember, together we can rid the world of bad software!

— No Comment