A person whose mind is behind the Excellent Game Psychonauts and all that other Grim-Throttle-Tentacle games is a one hilarious genius. There. Just wanted to say this after finishing Psychonauts.
On a completely unrelated note: yes, we are late with our long-awaited traffic monitoring software. But fear not. The product is actually ready and we just need one more week to polish things up, particularly, finish with the 60+ pages user guide.
Who said creating and selling software products is fun-n-easy? People, get real — this is hard work!
So it’s quite possible that we will meet the 1st of September deadline for launching Stuffed Tracker 2.0. Almost everything is ready, and I am currently preparing a User Guide which would be in PDF format. We originally wanted to create the guide in Adobe InDesign, but due to lack of time we might as well go with an auto-converted-from-Word version, sacrificing quality a little.
Anyway, at the beginning of April 2005 when the main tracking framework was ready, we started collecting statistics data on several large and small friendly sites. 5 months later we’ve managed to accumulate almost 500 megabytes of data!
And this actually helped us to identify the bottleneck in our original database design. We have designed the database in such a way that the same main 6 tables are used for storing tracking data for all sites defined in the tracker. However, this proved to be not so good after all, since this design penalized small sites.
Even if Stuffed Tracker displayed statistics for a small site with little amount of statistical data, we still had to extract these stats from huge common tables, sometimes containing several millions of records! So we did a terrible thing — we’ve made a major product design change only one week before it’s release.
Thankfully, due to a good code design, the change took only 1 day and went smoothly (as far as we can see). Now statistics for different companies and their sites is stored in separate company tables and doesn’t interfere with statistics for other companies and their sites.
This new design adds a little more work for the tracker in several places, but what is much more important — the statistical reports generation is now much more efficient in situation when a company with a large site and a company with a small site are tracked using one Stuffed Tracker installation..
I personally think that user interface is the most important part in any software. You can have the best functionality on the market, but if the UI in your product sucks then no one will buy it. Who needs software that is impossible to use?
In Stuffed Guys, we have a 2-tier process of creating user interface.
The first version of the interface is created during initial product development. It is done only by us; professional designer is not involved. The first version evolves a lot during the time when the product is developed. We constantly test it on ourselves as the first users of the product and make improvements where we can.
At the end of the product development we usually have an overall good UI, that as we think is easy to use and it usually looks good too. But we realize that since we were involved in the development of the product and know everything it does and how it does it we probably don’t see things that are still inconvenient for a new user.
So then we handle functionally finished product to the professional designer. One of the best advantages for us is that this designer is completely new to the product, he hasn’t used it yet. Based on his fresh look on how things work and should work, he creates an improved user interface, adding all required eye-candy to it in the process as well.
With Stuffed Tracker, we are currently at the last stages of the second tier described above. Professional designer is almost finished with his version of the UI and we are currently implementing it in html. Now, since the new version of Stuffed Tracker is build on our own Nova System framework that supports skins, we decided to keep both versions of the interface as two different skins both of which would be available in the final product.
1st version
2nd version
With Stuffed Tracker we want to be as liberal with licenses as possible. We want to trust our customers and want to make a process of purchasing and installing a license of the product as easy as possible for them.
You might know that there is a widely used approach to selling a web software product, which roughly works like this:
A customer pays for the software and gets access to the protected area on the developer’s web site, where the latest full version of the software can be downloaded. Usually the access is given for a year and to continue downloading new versions of the software a customer should pay a special renewal price.
With this approach there is usually only a functionally-limited trial version of the product available as a free download. Sometimes even a trial version is not available and you can only use an online demo version with no way of trying the software on your own server.
With Stuffed Tracker we want to do something different:
- A fully functional trial version (limited to 30 days of usage) would be available for a free download by anyone. This will always be the latest version of the software. No registration required. No strings attached. Completely open source code. We trust you.
- When you purchase a license, you get a license code, similar to the one we all got used to with desktop software. You enter this code in your copy of Stuffed Tracker and it automatically goes out of trial mode and become registered.
- You can continue to download the latest versions of the software even after the year has passed since your license purchase date.
- Your license will work with all new versions with the same first number, but would require an upgrade for a new major version with a new first number. For example, if you’ve purchased a license for version 2.x, it will work for any future 2.x versions, but will require an upgrade for 3.x version. We feel this is a fair deal for our customers, especially if compared to “updates for a year” approach.
The only little requirement that we would impose with this licensing scheme is a special page accessible in any installation of the product. It would list the ids of the licenses already installed and will help us to verify that licenses are valid in case this would become necessary. The license would forbid to remove or alter this page.
We’ve come up with a new idea last week when we were finishing Stuffed Tracker installation script. We want to track how our customers would use our tracker, what functions would be most popular, what would be the most popular paths inside the tracker’s control panel and things like this.
This would be a totally optional feature. During the installation a customer would be asked a question whether he or she wants to enable sending anonymous usage statistics to us so that we could further improve the tracker.
What’s even more interesting — we want to track usage of the tracker with the tracker itself! A separate installation of the tracker on our server will be dedicated to just doing that. We hope to gather some interesting stats that would help us to make valuable improvements to the product.
Also, this opens up a whole new market for the tracker - all companies that create web software products might be interested in a solution that would not only monitor all traffic and calculate conversion rates on their own sites but would also track usage statistics of their web software - all in one slick package.
We are preparing Stuffed Tracker 2.0 for the release in middle-end of August. Here is a one page product information sheet that we send out to the potential customers: Stuffed Tracker 2.0 Product Sheet.
Finally, we’ve settled on the slogan for the product: Traffic Monitoring & Conversion Tracking. We believe that is it — that is what it does.
Is it good to be number 1 result on Google for “verson tracker”?
Ooops. I think not.
On a brighter note, I’ve noticed that particular referrer inside an almost-ready-to-be-called-beta Stuffed Tracker 2.0.
Currently we are testing it with several large and small sites (including ours). It’s functionality is 95% complete, but we are still tweaking the database schemas and SQL statements to make the product work with large amounts of data as efficiently as possible (currently our test database is 160 Mb in size, and grows by around 2.45 Mb a day).
Although Stuffed Tracker has several settings that could be turned on and will prevent it from tracking potentially excessive information, like visitors paths and visitors with unknown referrers — we still want it to be ready for cases when our customer would decide to use it as a general traffic tracker (your own StatCounter anyone?).
Later: Just occured to me — this post has a good chance to become a new number 1 for “verson tracker” with these keywords in the URL and all.
New version of our paid & natural traffic tracking tool should reach beta stage in a few weeks. Here is teaser screenshot (that pie chart is done in Flash and has a wicked mouseover effect).
We, finally, have all the core logic ready for the upcoming new version of our web stats tracker. So, yesterday we had a long brainstorming session with Ivan where we’ve discussed the best way to show the reports both for the paid advertising and for natural searches.
As it appeared, almost every set of data can be presented in several different contexts.
For example, we might have the following logical structure for reports:
Paid ads -> Campaign A -> www.out-1st-site.com -> Referring hosts -> Keywords
Or using the same gathered data we might have the following structure:
Paid ads -> Keywords -> Referring hosts -> Campaign A -> www.out-1st-site.com
And etc. The number of combinations is not limited actually.
Eventually we’ve decided to implement what we’ve called a “reports constructor”. It will allow the user to go through the above logical structure in any order, choosing the next step to take at every point of the way.
We hope this will be a very flexible solution that we will be able to implement in a reasonable amount of time. I am expecting to describe this concept in more detail when we will have a working version of the constructor.
One of the new features that we introduce in version 2.0 of our ROI tracker is actions conversion tracking. This is by no means a new feature on the market, but current version of Stuffed Tracker can only track sales, and this limitation is due to initial design (that is more then 3 years old already!).
With some creativity it is possible to track actions using even current version of the tracker, but with the new version this process becomes very easy and convenient. I think Ivan has come with a brilliant design for this process.
Let’s say, you have a web site on which you have installed ST’s tracking code into all pages (via SSI or PHP include) and then you want to understand how many visitors coming from your Google AdWords ad have actually signed up for your newsletter.
In the upcoming version 2.0, to do this, you go into ST administration interface and specify the URL of the “thank you” page* that is displayed right after the successful conversion. And that’s basically all. ST will notice when this URL is loaded and will count one more conversion for the action that you’ve defined. This approach is much easier then a standard one, when you have to insert a specially generated javascript code for the sign up action on the “thank you” page in order to track it.
* “thank you” page is so overused in documentation to different trackers, including Google’s one, that I think it can already be called something like “thank-you-page” or TYP.