Getting Personal with your SAAS

Getting Personal with your SAAS

Yesterday Majestic launched a new dashboard feature. Running a Software as a Service is a great business model, but it ultimately relies on retaining and continually engaging your users. If they do not keep coming back - preferably every few days - then ultimately the subscriptions will dry up and the business model fails. That means ongoing investment, both in your product AND in your user base. Developing the right features and functionality lets you do both at the same time. Last year, for example, Majestic developed an entire gamification system to help users find out more about the link graph and tools. That was a huge amount of development compared to the dashboard that was launched yesterday, but it has been picked up by a university as part of a best of breed approach and I am delighted to say that we are now working with their "top data scientists" as they say in Interwebland to assess the impact (or otherwise) of Gamification on a user's advocacy of a brand like ours.

But a Dashboard is a MUCH lower hanging fruit and I am really not sure why we didn't tackle it years ago. really isn't as complicated as Gamification to build, but it makes an SAAS user's life much simpler, as it brings the things that users does every day into one simple to access place. There are some pretty straightforward ideas that we adopted, which - if you have any kind of online product - I imagine you could also use to build a dashboard.

Don't build a new page, adapt an existing one

We had been talking about creating personalised dashboards for ages, but that was a big ask... then someone realized (OK, our UX guy) that the existing account page already worked as a basic dashboard. OK - it only had the account details there, but it seemed to suddenly be a much smller challenge to develop that information into something really useful than to try and dream up a whole new section on the site.

Make it all about the user!

We started to bring in every section of the site that had information that the user looked at regularly, and then blended that with information that changed regularly. So most advanced users at some point staert building reports in our system. Reports take a few minutes to create, so they are not "instant" like other parts of the site. That means they get stored. We noticed that once a person creates a repirt, they are much more likely to keep updating that report every week or month than create brand new reports. So listing their old reports was a no-brainer! At the same time, most people just type in URls into the home page on our site to see who links to it - so if that is by far the most popular activity on the site, don't take it away from the dashboard! Give the user what they want. You can easily work out what they want from your analytics. We found Piwik.org to be better than Google Analytics at telling us this, by the way.

Use Cookies to keep data local

A neat trick is to use the browser's search history to keep a track of what our users were searching for most recently on our site. That means we do not have to store the information on our servers and seems to be a MUCH more honorable way to use cookies and the like than by dropping super beacon cookies to stalk your users around the web.

Bring in variable content like Newsfeeds

Our blog content is almost exclusively focused on our own product developments and activities. Sure, we sometimes go slightly off-piste, but the bigger issue is that our users do not always have the time or inclination to check whether there is anything on the blog that interests them. So the problem is... when there IS something important to them, they are not necessarily exposed to the news. By bringing the news into the dashboard, we removed the need to harass our loyal users. If they see a headline they want - they'll find out more. If not, I am glad not to have wasted their day.

Make the Dashboard elements collapsible or adaptable with CSS

This came out in user testing and will go live in a smaller relaunch next week - but we now see that not every user wants to see every part of the dashboards. Making it completely re-configurable for every user is a development challenge, but simply making sections collapsible and (hopefully) remembering the user's preferences from one day to the next gets us 80% of the way there. So if the user never needs his API key... or hates to see the what's new section... then one click and it is gone. Or at least... it will be.

Personalisation does not have to be a mountain to climb

Gamification was a huge time investment for us to develop - and I am the guilty "HIPPO" that started that one, but personalizing a user's experience does not have to remwin in the realm of the eBays and Amazons of this world. There are a lot of things we can do, it seems, to make our users' lives easier and not all of them have to cost the earth.

Dixon Jones.
Majestic is a specialist Search Engine that maps Trust and Backlinks on the web.

(I would like to apologize to any developers who were harmed in the making of this feature... Especially when I suggested this was easy!)

Matt W.

Regional Account Director EMEA at Learning Labs/FlashAcademy | Sales Trainer | Go Giver

9 年

Great article and useful insights Dixon thanks for sharing.

回复

要查看或添加评论,请登录

Dixon Jones ?的更多文章

  • Content that ranks AND converts?

    Content that ranks AND converts?

    "Tired of creating content that gets lost in the internet void? ?? I used to be too! But then I started thinking about…

  • Topical Content Planning is New (not "News")

    Topical Content Planning is New (not "News")

    Next week I head to Dallas for @InLinks to talk ,about my new buzzphrase, "Topical Authority Planning". This is the…

    2 条评论
  • Auditing your Knowledge Graph

    Auditing your Knowledge Graph

    If you are not a nerdy SEO, please go away..

    1 条评论
  • The US Search Awards are open for entries. Here is a list of Categories.

    The US Search Awards are open for entries. Here is a list of Categories.

    The US Search Awards are now in their 5th(?) year I think and they really are worth entering. Just getting on the…

  • How to Avoid a Loss of Perspective

    How to Avoid a Loss of Perspective

    Running an Internet business is much more difficult when you have money or time pressures. It is not always clear what…

    2 条评论
  • Express & Mirror SEO fight for "SEM"

    Express & Mirror SEO fight for "SEM"

    This is an interesting SEO phenomenon. Major national papers are fighting over a 24 hour SEO opportunitty every day to…

    1 条评论
  • Printing the Internet in 3D from Space

    Printing the Internet in 3D from Space

    Majestic.com – a specialist search engine and “Deloitte 50” fastest growing company in the UK - is “over the moon” to…

    9 条评论
  • Saving S.A.A.S. Users time, With Timely Alerts

    Saving S.A.A.S. Users time, With Timely Alerts

    I think Majestic has started 2016 well. In the first couple of weeks we created personalized dashboards for our users…

    1 条评论
  • Can Links Predict Elections?

    Can Links Predict Elections?

    Over at Majestic we occasionally play with out link data to make predictions about elections. We have looked at a…

    3 条评论
  • See the Top 10 Most Influential people for anything

    See the Top 10 Most Influential people for anything

    “Do Twitter engagements or follower numbers help you decide whether or not you would follow a certain profile? Wish…

    11 条评论

社区洞察

其他会员也浏览了