Posted on 31 July 2012 by Nick Boyce
Spotted this interesting piece on Flickr’s code blog about the thought behind their new liquid photo page, which is very relevant to some of the things we are thinking about at the moment.
Posted on 02 June 2012 by Nick Boyce
Colin Strong from GfK did a great presentation at Digital Shoreditch yesterday on behavioural economics called The lesson of jam sandwiches for service developers and marketeers which ties in with a lot of things we’ve been discussing internally. Here are my takeaways:
In the Jam sandwich study, customers were presented with 24 jams, which resulted in a 3% takeup. When the number of jams was reduced to 6, the takeup jumped to 30%. Reduce choice to increase conversions.
Introducing options in a product mix can have an effect on the percieved value of the other options. As an example, when consumers were shown three options for Economist subscriptions…
…nobody picked option 2 and 84% choose option 3. That’s because option 2 is acting as a decoy option 3 more attractive. When option 2 was removed, only 32% selected Option 3.
Once consumers feel they own an item they are reluctant to part with it. On Ebay, the highest bidder often starts thinking about possessing item, leading to more aggressive bidding. Amazon Prime’s limited trial makes customers focus on what they will lose if they cancel their subscription.
Consumers are hugely influenced by the behaviour of others. Stock levels create a fear of missing out. I also think that positive social reinforcement - showing that other “real” people are buying an item - can be a huge influence also.
Overall assessment is not key, only if the customer had a very positive or very negative experience. Create “positive peaks” through magic moments to leave a positive impression. Add something for free. It’s inexpensive and has a disproportionate impact on satisfaction.
Posted on 21 May 2012 by Nick Boyce
Recently we’ve switched from FTP to git to deploy changes to our live sites. Here’s what our workflow looks like for functional changes (content amends use steps1,2,5,7,8):
By using a Git-centric workflow, it’s easier to guarantee that each application is running the same code, and we have the added safety of being able to roll back to previous versions.
Pulling changes onto live websites with millions of daily visitors makes me a little nervous, so I’ll usually use git fetch rather than git pull, like so:
$ git fetch
Pulls the remote master branch into a branch in the local repository called origin/master.
$ git diff --numstat master origin/master
Reports the affected files between master and the origin/master branch we pulled in the previous step.
$ git merge master origin/master
Merges the origin/master branch into master.
Posted on 01 May 2012 by Nick Boyce
We’ve been doing some restructuring here at Easyart, in order to set up a more Git-centric workflow for deployments. We wanted to make sure that we had some tests which would help us spot any problems while we made the transition.
I’m relatively comfortable with Rspec, so it was a natural starting point. But given that the sites themselves aren’t built in Ruby, I’m using Rspec to power Selenium Webdriver.
Here’s a sample test:
The Selenium::WebDriver object makes writing these tests pretty simple. These are the main methods we use:
That’s pretty much it! These are the methods in the Selenium::WebDriver::Element object we are making the most use of:
Here’s an example which makes use of these:
One thing that took some getting used to was using the Selenium::WebDriver::Wait object. When you do a click, you have to tell Selenium you want to wait for a certain condition to be true before moving on to the next live of code.
In this example, I’m waiting until the H1 tag contains the word “cart”:
I’m used Rspec for unit and request specs, but it’s advantageous to use a visible browser for this type of testing, as sometimes you can spot things with your eye that your tests won’t. Then you write the test to catch it.
Posted on 27 April 2012 by Steve Rydz
Sublime Text 2 has been my text editor of choice for almost a year now but as I find myself working from the command line more and more these days, I thought I’d share a quick tip I picked up from Nick, opening files from the command line.
To begin with, we need to ensure that the bin directory is specified in our path. Just paste the following into Terminal:
$ echo "export PATH=~/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.profile
Next up, we need to create the subl command. To do that just paste the following into Terminal:
$ ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl
To make sure this is working, just type subl into Terminal and press enter. If you’ve followed the steps above then that should open up Sublime.
We’ve already seen how the subl command can be used to open Sublime itself, however it can also be used to open files and directorys, among other things.
This command opens a directory called mySite:
$ subl ~/Documents/mySite
This command opens a file from the above directory called index.html:
$ subl ~/Documents/mySite/index.html
This only scratches the surface of what you can do with this type of command. To see other actions available, try typing subl –help into Terminal and pressing enter. This will give you a list of ways to use this command.
Note: This post is pretty much lifted from a post I wrote on my own blog last night:
http://steverydz.com/2012/04/27/sublime-text-2-opening-files-and-folders-from-the-command-line/