Words from CanvasDropr

CanvasDropr is in good company today. DesignerMag named CanvasDropr one of the top collaboration tools for web designers and developers along with amazing products such as GoogleDrive, Basecamp and Zoho.

As DesignerMag puts it, “it is key for designers and developers to have a convenient and reliable way to share their projects with the rest of the team.” This is just one of the many problems CanvasDropr solves for users around the globe: working together real-time to make the process of designing and developing for the web much faster and more efficient. 

Today is a pretty big day for us. Jeff Coe, experienced entrepreneur and one of Europe’s top 100 most influential technology experts, is joining our company as the CEO. 

We’re excited to bring the native Australian on board. Check out his LinedIn profile to see the cool stuff he has done before: Linkedin.com/in/jeffacoe 

We look forward to good times ahead, as does Jeff: 

“The collaboration space is white hot at the moment due to the ever increasing use of remote workplaces and wireless technologies so adding this with the vision shown by Canvasdropr and Presentation.io and the progress made by the company in such a short time, and it was a simple decision for me to join the team and help lead them into becoming the leading international company within the collaboration space”. 

Big welcome to Jeff!!                                            

It’s a great day for all of us at CanvasDropr. After receiving tons of feedback and customer demand we are proud to release our second product, Presentation.io to compliment our global strategy of becoming a leader in synced collaboration and communication online. Presentation.io gives anyone the ability to broadcast a slideshow to their audience’s computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet, using only your browser or smart device.

CanvasDropr is going faster and stronger than ever and we have expanded our team to ensure our high standards and performance across the product platform. Great things will follow - stay turned.

We are looking for ambassadors to promote the product in specific industries and would love to hear from you if this sounds interesting at hello@presentation.io. Give it a spin at https://presentation.io

CanvasDropr has been nominated as the “Best Newcomer” at the E-commerce awards 2013 in Denmark by a panel of 65 e-commerce experts across the country.  

The criteria for nomination and award are “exceptional results with regards to the market, the company’s growth potential and its growth strategy. In it’s judging, the jury looks at the degree the company leverages the opportunities of the Web and the degree of innovation in its business.” 

If you want a say, you can vote for us for the User’s Choice award here: http://www.fdih.dk/e-handelsprisen/e-handelsprisen-2013/brugernes-favorit/  

A recent tweet reminded us at CanvasDropr that it would be pretty cool if more online services humanized their Terms of Use. 

What do we mean when we humanize the Terms of Service? Basically, it’s just a button that will turn the Terms of Service into digested headlines that can be understood by anyone.

As you can read, the digested terms are (of course) not legally binding but are merely an indication of what the terms contain in a basic sense.

Below are some examples of the digested terms that were once longwinded paragraphs of text 

The benefits are obvious: Keep your users happy with a short, digested version of your terms of service while still keeping the lawyers satisfied with the longer version. 

Quality user feedback is essential when you’re developing a platform like CanvasDropr and any other webapp. If you want  to know how we radically increased the amount of quality feedback from users and customers and thereby increased the overall user satisfaction from 55% to almost 90% and became a profitable business while still in Beta - all in just 15 weeks - keep reading. 

What we changed is all about how we collect feedback from users. We used to have a feedback button in the right hand side of the page for users to hopefully give us their thoughts about our product. A pretty standard approach to user feedback. We were working with initial customers and early users face to face, on Skype, etc. but with limited resources there was no way we were able to get all the quality feedback we needed to develop our product in the right direction, driven by users. Our feedback button was hardly being used – it gave us virtually no quality feedback. 

Then we did this one thing. One thing. And the amount of valuable user feedback increased from almost nothing to over 60% of new and old users giving us feedback that we could actually use to improve.

In a matter of weeks, actually only 6 weeks, our user satisfaction skyrocketed. Now, 15 weeks into the experiment, we’re at almost 90% satisfaction. See the development below. 

So how did we achieve this? We developed a Binary system for User Experience, measuring the user’s previous behaviour and the context inside the platform and then prompting the user with a binary feedback decision. E.g. this one is prompted to new users after roughly 2 minutes using the canvas (it doesn’t pop up, it just appears in the top where it doesn’t disturb the user’s work). 

This way, we pose people with binary decisions, not large input fields that makes the user feel they have to put a lot of effort into their feedback form.  Almost every time a user clicks ‘needs work’, they type in the reason. This context-based feedback system is the single most important step that we have taken at CanvasDropr to make the user experience better. 

In the market research business, it was found that consumers are increasingly saturated by market research and that this has lead to decreasing response rates and an increased danger of response bias. Market researchers have to solve these challanges and think of new, innovative ways of recruiting respondents, increasing response rates and reducing respondent fatigue by making survyes as short and ‘respondable’ as possible.

This is not only a challenge for companies conducting market research or surveys, this might also be happening in the software business. Users are signed up for more and more services online, they are faced with ‘feedback’ buttons and surveys in a lot of places and everything looks the same. First-movers and heavy users of our products are the ones that we need to get an opinion from to develop or product, to attract more users and to, ultimately, make more money. To get that valuable feedback, we’ve seen great results taking a more deep and strategic approach to user feedback as one of the most important aspects of our business. 

We have definitely waved goodbye to our good old feedback button, probably the smartest move for our business so far.

We’re considering to publish these thoughts as a client-side framework for easy implementation elsewhere. If you are interested, get in touch at  cwa@canvasdropr.com. 

It’s Christmas time and what better present than to be mentioned as one of the top 25 rising Cloud stars in Europe. CloudTweaks highlights that CanvasDropr “enables users to view what is going on before them, whether they are in a partnership project or they are comparing notes. The greatest thing is that it eliminates third-party programs.” 

Thank you CloudTweaks; we promise that 2013 will be an even better year for collaboration in the cloud. 

Working together to solve complex (and trivial) tasks in the everyday work place is key to the efficiency - and thereby also the revenue, of companies world-wide. But something startles me about the way many companies think about efficiency and collaboration. They buy tools that everyone has to use, that require tons of installations, costs heaps of money and might not even be compatible with their customers’ or partners’ tools and therefore end up being a hazzle for the employees in stead of an actual cost-saver and efficiency booster.  

A recent post about the state of the enterprise software industry in TechCrunch indicates that this space needs some disruption:

“The enterprise software space is a giant stinking mess, and it’s going to get even messier if the vendors don’t start embracing the new spirit of collaboration and social technologies that represent the modern data workflow”.

Luckily, the ones who are deciding about the degree of messiness in the enterprise software space is the customers, not the vendors. At CanvasDropr, we believe that our customers and our customer’s employees are front runners in shaking things up in enterprise software. How? By letting tools into the daily workflow that are easy to access, need no installations or 3rd party components. By letting people decide for themselves how they want to work. That’s the real efficiency booster, not the platform itself. 

What can we do as people who make and sell the products that make companies more efficient? We can make sure that our product is compatible with other platforms (also known as competitors), we can make sure that it’s easy to use our product, we can make sure that our customers don’t rely on our expertise for any installations or updates (which in the short term could make us more money) because in the end, that might just end up making it much easier for everyone in this so-called ‘messy’ enterprise software industry.