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Archive for the ‘webapps’ category

TenderApp vs GetSatisfaction vs UserVoice

July 10th, 2009

Help

All over the internet mysterious little tabs have started popping into the edges of or browser windows. Webapps right across the planet seem to be afflicted with this new curse. The WHO must surely now declare this a pandemic. What’s the cure? I believe the answer could lie in the hands of ENTP’s TenderSupport!

Providing help for your webapp is very important. Your users need to feel like they’ve got somewhere to go if they get stuck or find a problem, and you need to have a way to manage their requests and provide them with informative articles to point them back in the right direction. It’s a key part of your product.

I think the new tab popout is being misused. It’s great for trying to determine what your users really want and it’s got a novelty factor but I think it distracts from what’s really required in a help system, and that’s to provide good clear help. UserVoice and GetSatisfaction do similar things (as their key feature) – they quickly gather user’s opinions or problems and allow other users to bump up the priority of other user’s opinions or problems. That’s fun, but what users really want is to find the answer to their problems (as the key feature). That’s what TenderSupport does best and that’s why I’ve chosen them for bookwhen’s help.

Afterthought: I have to admit that I caught the tabmania virus briefly too and slapped UserVoice’s on whichweekend. I went with them over GetSatisfaction because I slightly preferred their user interface. Since reading 37Signal’s rant (which was harsh!), I’m glad I did as I marginally agree. Also, they don’t let you delete your account! Grr.

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Posted in bookwhen, general, help, webapps

Tags: entp getsatisfaction help tenderapp tendersupport uservoice

Event registration system

July 9th, 2009

Current event registration systems tend to focus on single events and charge for usage by taking a cut of the ticket price. Bookwhen goes down a slghtly different path. It’s main booking portal screen list all of the upcoming events allowing easy browsing, and the service is charged at a monthly flat rate. This makes it a bargain for the larger users, and ideal for organisations with multiple upcoming events or repeating events.

DEFRA are currently using the site to take registrations to their Climate Projections events, and later in the summer the UK Climate Impact Program are going to use the site for their events. That’s makes over 10,000 bookings in the next few months. Exciting stuff.

It’s great to have some big players on board. This will surely be the tipping point. Having said that, there are still some usability issues left to address so that will be the top priority in the next few weeks.

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Posted in bookwhen, webapps

Removing the www on a passenger rails app

February 19th, 2009

I’ve recently moved from nginx with mongrels to phusion passenger on apache.

I like to drop the www subdomain on my sites when I can, but the passenger chaps recommend that you don’t use mod_rewrite with mod_rails (aka mod_rack or even mod_ruby).

So how’s it to be done?

The simple solution is to do the re-write in rails. I found this snippet which does the trick (thanks to RSL):

def trim_www
  if request.subdomains.first == "www"
    if request.subdomains == ["www"]
      redirect_to "#{request.protocol}#{request.domain}#{request.port_string}#{request.path}"
    else
      subdomains = request.subdomains.shift.join(".")
      subdomains &lt;&lt; "." unless subdomains.blank?
      redirect_to "#{request.protocol}#{subdomains}#{request.domain}#{request.port_string}#{request.path}"
    end
  end
end