It was a long time since my last post about Factory Nova here. Now that we’ve finally released Stuffed Tracker (I’ll post a separate story about this later) we can concentrate on finishing Factory Nova.
I think I can safely say that 90% of the functionality is already complete in Factory Nova. We are using it ourselves for around 6 months now and I can report that it helped us a lot in the Stuffed Tracker development.
Most interesting features added in the last 30 days:
- Filters for tasks — we now have powerful filters in the Tasks module. With filters we can specify certain conditions and display only the tasks that match these conditions (for example, tasks assigned to a certain user or users or tasks assigned to me with the high priority and with a deadline in the next 3 days). Filters could be saved for easy re-use later.
- Modules could be switched off — now it is possible to select what modules you want to have in a particular project (we currently have Tasks, Emails, Forums, Knowledge Base and Files available). So we can now have a project that only has Forums module, for example (we’ve called this project “Lounge” and this is a place where the team hangs out and posts interesting news and stuff).
- Labels — we can assign one or more labels to any task and then use filters to quickly see tasks belonging to one or more labels. This is a very flexible solution. Labels could be used to mark tasks that should be done for a certain version release, or tasks that are “Bugs” or tasks that are “Features” and so on.
- Tree view and a flat list — it is now possible to view the tasks both as a tree and as a flat list. I’ve never seen this functionality in other project management software, but it is really useful. Sometimes you need a tree view, and sometimes you need a flat view (where tasks are sorted by priority, deadline, etc).
And finally, we are experimenting with file uploads in Flash 8 that was released not long ago. It looks like a little revolution, actually. Finally it is possible to upload a file or even several files from inside the browser and see the progress of the upload. It is even possible to cancel the upload while it is in progress.
Our office is located very near the Moscow River and today in the morning I took a very nice walk along the river with my camera. It was a very nice day too.
Starting from tomorrow, we will begin our first PPC advertising campaign. This might seem strange that we haven’t done any PPC advertising and yet created an Excellent Conversion Tracking Tool specially for measuring effectiveness of such advertising.
But actually there is nothing strange in this. Although we haven’t done any PPC advertising ourselves we have several clients who heavily advertise through Yahoo/Overture, Google and Miva. We have developed several custom tracking solutions for them during the course of the previous 3 years. And by now we know a lot about this stuff.
But still — no actual experience.
I think I have an interesting idea how we can spice things up here. We are going to create a special landing page that will display everything that Stuffed Tracker knows about the current visitor. Where he or she arrived from, from what search engine, what he or she was searching for, what actions this visitor has performed on our site, whether he or she has downloaded files or viewed screenshots already.
In my opinion, this will be a great showcase of the actual Stuffed Tracker capabilities and a fast way to explain to the visitor what the software is all about.
Also, with the help of the split testing functionality available in Stuffed Tracker, I would be able to send the visitors from one advert to different pages of the site and then measure which pages were most effective for what actions (download of a trial!) or sales. This should clearly show if the “showcase” page is a good idea or not.
It always seemed amusing to us how we are going to create this completely new version of our conversion tracking tool and will use it to track its own conversion rates. Kind of like “eating your own dog food meets recursion” concept.
And we are finally doing this for real, which is a little weird. After 9 months of non-stop development of the product all the plans that we have thought through are coming to life.
With the new version of Stuffed Tracker we are tracking downloads of the trial version, sales (of course) and even particular screenshots views. Very interesting stuff.
