Field notes from making—and hustling— Deckset
Last week we shipped an update to our presentation writing app Deckset. Alongside with it, we’ve also overhauled the website. In the process, we tried a few new — or new to us — tools and things. Here are three things we found the most helpful.
Analytics with Keen
With this update, we’ve switched away from our own analytics implementation to Keen. It’s basically a data warehouse and analytics product. You can send any kind of data event to Keen and then very easily query and visualise that data. It’s much more accessible compared to our previous, slightly obscure analytics implementation and is definitely recommended. So now, every time we have a question or want to verify an assumption (“How often do people use Deckset in a given timeframe?”, “Do people actually use the Rehearsal mode?”), we can just head over to Keen, build a query and chances are high we get an insightful answer.
Documentation with Jekyll Apple Help
Another thing we meant to optimise for ages is the documentation. As the complexity of Deckset increases, we felt the need to improve our documentation. We wanted the documentation to feel as native as possible in the context of the app. But we also wanted something we can easily make available on the website. (It would be a nightmare having to maintain two different kinds of documentations, getting one right is already painful enough.)
Enter Jekyll Apple Help. It’s a template for the popular static site generator Jekyll. It makes it very easy to author and build a Mac OS X Help Book. This Help Book is then rendered using Apple’s built-in Help viewer so it feels entirely native to the platform. However, as it’s built with Jekyll, you can also create a static website from the exact same source files.
Lauren then reworked the default styles it comes with so that it looks even closer to other Help Books that ship with the default Mac OS X apps.
Live chat with Smooch
Lastly, we wanted to add one of those little live chat thingies to the marketing website. We thought it would help increase conversions if people had an easier, more immediate way to ask us questions. We’ve been using a product called Intercom which works great but offers significantly more than we need for Deckset. We settled on Smooch.io and absolutely love it: The killer feature for us is that it integrates with Slack. (The fact that it comes with a pretty generous free plan is nice as well.)
So now, every time someone uses the chat on decksetapp.com, a new Slack channel is created and a message is posted to our #deckset-support channel. Whoever sees the request first and has a second joins that channel and responds to the inquiry.
Only once you prefix a message with a special slash command it gets sent back to the customer. That way you can discuss how to handle a certain request in the best way internally first. There’s also an “Office Hours” integration available.
A++ will live chat again.
