Building & shipping
UX Check
It’s been a month since I launched my free Chrome Extension, UX Check (website | Medium post). The extension improves the flow of a heuristic evaluation by allowing you to make annotations right inside Chrome and export screenshots of your webpage.
When I launched the extension, I honestly expected no more than 100 people to try it out. At this point, more than 50K people have visited the website and 11K people have installed the extension. Much of the popularity is thanks to being prominently featured on Product Hunt and Hacker News. Here is the story about how I built it and launched it.
- Staying motivated on a side project
- A solid launch process
- Data & insights: Product Hunt vs Hacker News
Staying motivated on a side project
UX Check was four months of hard work, and along the way, I learned a few techniques that helped keep my motivation up.
Side projects dinner: I started work on UX Check in August. I was aching to build something, but the scope of the project was daunting. To stay motivated, I thought back to my college days, and remembered how valuable design reviews and adviser check-ins were. So I sent out a Facebook invite to a few friends saying ‘Come over to my place. I will cook you dinner, and you will give me feedback on my project’. The first dinner was fantastic. Side Projects Dinner is now an every-other week occurrence, and I’m not the only one who presents. It’s been a fantastic way to gather feedback and keep up my spirits as I get into challenging parts of the project. It’s also pushed me to continue working — I didn’t want to have a bunch of people over for dinner, and then have nothing to show for them!
If you’re going to tell friends about your project, either share everything, or share nothing: I started off the project by doing most of the frontend heavy lifting. That meant that I was able to share the concept of the project with my parents very easily, which was quite exciting. Unfortunately, for the next two months, I had no interesting updates for them as I worked on the backend. At the end of the day, if you are going to show off your project, make sure you find someone who will appreciate all aspects of your progress. Otherwise, the inconsistent motivation can be detrimental.
Get a friend to cut features: In early November, the project was daunting. I went overboard in Balsamiq and had a ton of great features planned. It was too much though, and I considered quitting altogether. That was until my friends forced me to write down the remaining features that I absolutely had to implement before shipping. One by one, I wrote more and more. The more features I wrote, the more ridiculous it sounded that these are absolute musts. Together, we cut most of the features and scoped down the purpose and cost of UX Check.
A solid launch process
After all of this hard work, it felt surreal to finally reach ship day. I got quite lucky with my launch. Here’s how it went:
Find some time to escape: Shipping is hectic as hell. I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday morning, but still stressed out of my mind. After fixing the few bugs that some friends found, I decided that things were stable enough to go for a quick run. I can’t stress enough how amazing it was to get away from my computer. After being tied down to code for so long, it was nice to feel so free. I highly recommend planning for escape time!
Soft launch, hard launch, and harder launch: Rather than post my project on Product Hunt right away, I shared UX Check with my friends on Facebook and Twitter on a Saturday (12/20). This was a great practice launch. A friend found a critical bug that I was able to fix before the hard launch. On Sunday (12/21), UX Check was third on Product Hunt, which led to more traffic than I ever expected (data below). I got tons of great feedback, and I was able to ship improvements to address the top complaints very quickly. Then almost a month later (1/13), someone else posted it to Hacker News, which doubled my traffic. I feel quite lucky that I had the time to optimize UX Check thanks to the Product Hunt community before going on Hacker News!
Launch data & insights
Product Hunt
On 12/21, UX Check ended third on Product Hunt. The data below shows how much traffic this drove.
Hacker News
On 1/13, mhr_online posted UX Check to Hacker News and again, it ended up third. I was floored at the traffic spike!
Traffic differences
Because UX Check was featured on different dates, I was able to find some interesting differences between Hacker News & Product Hunt.
Hacker News drove 5x more visitors to the site
Duh.
Product Hunt users were slightly more engaged
When I launched on Product Hunt, I saw a conversion rate of 16.5%, and when I launched on Hacker News, I saw a conversion rate of 14.7%. While the difference is small, it is statistically significant (p = 0.0005). The difference likely has to do with the different purposes and designs of the two sites.
Another interesting metric to track was the % of unqiue visitors who tweeted about UX Check. On launch day, Product Hunters tweeted about UX Check at a rate of 1.9x the rate at which Hacker News users tweeted (p = 0.000015). 1.7% of the unique visitors from Product Hunt tweeted about UX Check, whereas only 0.9% of Hacker news users tweeted.
The final interesting metric to compare engagement is average time spent on the website. On average, Product Hunt users spent 45 seconds on UXcheck.co, whereas Hacker News users only spent 30 seconds on the site.
Hacker News has a much harsher drop-off in traffic
With Product Hunt, the UX Check website had a smaller traffic drop-off than with Hacker News:
- Product Hunt, day after launch: 54% less traffic
- Product Hunt, two days after launch: 18% less traffic
- Hacker News, day after launch: 84% less traffic
- Hacker News, two days after launch: 56% less traffic
The difference here likely stems from a few things: 1) Product Hunt uses infinite scroll, so it’s very easy to see older posts. 2) Hacker News has way more submissions per day than Product Hunt, so there is no easy way to see “yesterday’s” front page. 3) Product Hunters tweeted about UX Check more, so its visibility lived on over the next few days.
What’s next for UX Check?
Since the launch, I’ve been working hard on V2 of UX Check. It will remain free and open source, and hopefully include plenty of features that will further improve your workflow. I’ll release the new version sometime in the next few months, and you can follow me at @cgallello to hear about it. Finally, to all of you who have installed UX Check, shared it with others, or even reached out to me with your enthusiasm and feedback, I want to thank you very much. Keep the feedback coming, and best of luck on your UX evaluations!
cgallello@outlook.com
