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!)