The UX Shop: Building traction with a side side-project
Getting people to know your product or service seems like a very hard thing to do. After the initial buzz, it takes effort to keep a steady influx of people interested enough to come back to your content. For The UX Shop, we brainstormed about the ways we could reach people. Not too long before the end of our development cycle, we came with a few traction channels that we thought were legitimate:
- Content Marketing (hello!)
- Email marketing (through UX Empathy, our newsletter)
- Social media (you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest)
- Engineering as Marketing
Engineering as Marketing
The idea behind this traction channel is to build a software product that attracts people to our service. We instantly thought it would be great for a few reasons:
Bring something to the community. The UX Shop’s motto is “Handpicked products by/for digital designers”. How about we bring a product that fits this description? It would be awesome!
Developers love UX. If there’s something I know as a developer, it’s that each and every front-enders out there love UX. In fact, I’m almost certain all of them are best friends with a UX Designer. Yet, I’m not sure the UX Designer love them back. So how about we show them some love? Jokes aside, front-end developers are a niche we would like to target, and there’s no better way to attract them than to hang out in Github.
Linear: a ruler app for front-enders with an itch for pixel-perfect
While we were developing The UX Shop, we realized that doing simple things weren’t easy. Here is a list of the pains we were faced with:
- Checking the spacing between two elements
- Checking proportions on different applications such as Illustrator, Sketch or Invision
- Making sure the margins of the grid were the same on every browser
- Tell if an element is centered
- The font looks off… Is it the same size as in the design document?
- Adjusting the size of an element live with a ruler open
- All of the above for each and every breakpoint
While there are tons of ruler applications out there, most of them are browser extensions. The way they work is by adding a CSS overlay over the page. This makes them a pain to use when tweaking the page’s DOM.
So out of frustration, we decided to build our own. Linear is a ruler application with web development in mind. It helps people with a pixel-perfect taste sleep better at night, and be more productive during the day. Easy, right? :)
Linear is a stand-alone app built with Electron. So it’s made entirely of JavaScript, HTML and CSS, making it completely hackable for any web-developer.
How
It was really important for us to make the application open-source and hackable. We use it and want other to use it too, but we also want people to help us make it better.
We created a repository on Github where you can download the latest build and browse the code. Note that the application is also available on HomeBrew if you are a Mac user.
There is a companion website with a little video that presents Linear and shows how to use it. Go check it out once you are done reading this article! ;)
The reception
With the help of Google Analytics, we could see who talked about Linear. We found out that this cool Japanese website made gifs that explain how to use the app. Also that this other Japanese website wrote an entire tutorial together with screenshots.
And that’s on the other side of the planet! It’s crazy, but we love it. I could also talk about this Vietnamese website or this Chinese website, but what I’m really happy is the recent feature on Totally Tooling, a youtube channel with developers I admire a lot. Hey Addy!
At the time of this writing, Linear just went above the 200 stars cap on Github, and we’re really happy about that.
How did it perform?
By looking at the numbers, Linear Website is our 7th source of traffic for referral visitors. It doesn’t perform well compared to other sources, yet little by little the numbers are getting better. The growth is more organic. The people interested by Linear get more involved with us or with its development, which is also great!
So was it the optimal traction strategy? No, I don’t think so. At least, not right now. However, building a side-side project is always a cool story to tell on a side-project publication. ;)
Wanna have a look at our project? Please visit http://theuxshop.com
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