Visual Website Optimizer new interface + new features + 10,000 accounts | Hacker News Reader

Visual Website Optimizer new interface + new features + 10,000 accounts

visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

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I will mention some technologies/resources we used in the new interface. Hope it helps others.

* For generating screenshots, we used the awesome PhantomJS http://www.phantomjs.org/

* Color scheme was decided using http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html and http://colorschemedesigner.com/

* We used fonts from Google Open fonts http://www.google.com/webfonts

* Icon set was discovered (and subsequently purchased) via http://www.iconfinder.com/

* We used jQuery heavily for AJAX based test creation and reports

* The charts developed using Flot library http://code.google.com/p/flot/

Would love to hear feedback on the new interface. We worked hard on this one :)

Loved new interface. Its slick. Keep up good work! :)

Thanks for posting the list. A couple of cool things in there that I hadn't heard of. The design looks great too, by the way.

Now I think about it there are couple of more technologies we used:

* TinyMCE for WYSIWYG editor: http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

* Redis for heatmap and screenshot queue http://redis.io/

* Tipsy for Facebook-like tips http://onehackoranother.com/projects/jquery/tipsy/

Love it, good job.

Is the voice-over woman on the demo video a bot? Her sentences don't flow well and sound awkward, why not use a real person?

Nope, voice-over is not a bot but we outsourced it. Didn't realize she sounds like a bot. Let me collect some more feedback on this.

Her sentences sound forced to me as well. Specially the way she says "WYSIWYG".

If I hadn't read your comment, I too would have assumed it was a bot.

Yeah, that's true. We clearly told her to speak it as "wee-zee-wig" (fearing otherwise she would simply speak each letter) but she stumbled on the word (I guess). I gather from comments here that we probably need to redo the audio.

"whizzy wig"?

Perhaps you could test out different voices, and test which ones people skip over vs which ones people watch all the way through? Doesn't youtube offer some stats on that?

I wondered this when she said "WYSIWYG". There are a few points where the tone of her voice suggests she is either at the start or the end of a sentence, but in fact she isn't.

a/b test it.

I have a crazy idea about demo videos which you might want to A/B test against your current video: get your customers to record videos showing how they actually use VWO on their sites. At least I always find it a lot more convincing when I see a video in a normal voice showing me a real use-case rather than a scripted marketing video.

For example, the Basecamp landing page with real customer interviews and screenshots of the app looks a lot more appealing to me - http://basecamphq.com

It's an excellent idea and we do have a video from customer titled "Why I love Visual Website Optimizer" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W5fPdpdVAE

However it is for the old interface.

That is a really good video. A lot more engaging.

Just logged in and saw the lightbox announcing the changes. The first line says "World's easiest A/B testing tool just became even more easier.". That should be either "became even more easy" or "became even easier".

Also, what happened to the section that tells me whether the test is finished or not? There used to be something saying that the results aren't conclusive yet, and the test needs to run longer. Now... nothing?

Oops, yes! Good catch. Fixing it.

One of the few profitable, promising Indian startups. Keep rocking.

Given that 84,000 businesses were registered in India in 2008 [1] I imagine there's considerably more than "a few" profitable indian startups out there.

1) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+businesses+register...

For the HN crowd, startup means web-startup.

Which is kind of sad.

Out of curiosity what made you decide to switch from vertical navigation to horizontal navigation ?

I've been trying to decide which would be better for my own app and VWO's was among the better vertical navigation websites in terms of how "intuitive" it seemed.

I agree that it was a tough decision but our users gave feedback that with vertical navigation they had to do a lot of scrolling and since they compare performance on conversion goals, it is a lot of back and forth with navigation. With horizontal navigation, there is no need to do scrolling.

I think we may give an option to switch between vertical or horizontal navigation. It should be easy feature to build.

2.2 billion pageviews a month? really?

Yes, that's right!

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