EyeQuant — Make design measurable

EyeQuant’s “attention map” for one of the versions of our comparison results

EyeQuant developed an algorithm able to reproduce the eye movements of average users seiing a web-page for the first time. They are using machine learning based on thousands of eye-tracking heat maps generated from real people in university laboratories and is now able to replicate users behavior with an 85% accuracy. What used to take dedicated lab equipment and dozens of testers (and therefore cost thousands of dollars and take weeks), can now be done in a few seconds and for a few dollars thanks to Eyequant.

I use their service to test many iterations of a design on the fly, often very early in the design process. It’s a nice addition to Hotjar and their “click heat maps” generated by users visiting our website.

Zapier — Connect your apps and Automate Workflows

Zapier, to automate (almost) everything in your workflows

I have been using Zapier for many years now, but it’s only recently that I started including it in many key workflows at Monito.

Zapier connects my favorite tools, automating small tasks like sending requests from our contact form (powered by TypeForm) to the right support’s inbox (powered by Groove), or creating a bug report in our collaboration tool (we use Podio) whenever we report one on Slack.

But Zapier is even more powerful when it allows us to save precious development time to launch the MVP of user-facing features on Monito. Our “request a quote” feature — which allows Monito users to get a quote from the most competitive providers for their high-value transfers — was entirely built by connecting a TypeForm, a Google Spreadsheet and our CRM (Active Campaign).

With the ability to connect almost any tools you can think of, Zapier is one of the product I admire the most as it really plays the role of making the digital world works better and smarter.

Google Optimize’s dashboard for one of our A/B tests

This lesser-known tool from Google is integrated with Google Analytics and allows you to run A/B and multivariate tests on your website really easily. It gives you a live editor of your website (think of it as a simplified developer tools in your browser) where you can make changes and then automatically launch your tests.

You can test a new tagline for your homepage or for a specific user-segment, four different colors for a call-to-action or different background images. The only limit is that you can only run three tests at the same time in the free version (and the enterprise plans are out of reach for a startup).

PRO TIP: I sometimes start by making a lot of iterations that I analyze through EyeQuant to see how the user’s attention on the page is affected by my layout changes, and then test the most promising variation with Google Optimize.

Live chat — (Chatra & Messenger)

Users can chat with Monito on Messenger

Adding a live chat on our website brought us a lot. Not only are we able to convert more users by providing them with the information they need and answer their specific questions, it is a great resource to really understand our users. Answering chat messages with a “user research” hat rather than a “customer support” hat makes the time investment really worth it.

Chatra is not the most popular chat option available, but for us, it was the best choice for a long time as it’s really affordable while offering the key features we need, the most important being the ability to trigger chat messages to start conversations with users matching certain criteria. We’re currently testing the Facebook Messenger chat integration (still in beta) to see if it could be a better alternative.

Pingpong — Effortless remote user research

Focus on the discussion with potential users with Pingpong

I’ve been doing un-moderated user-testing (receiving videos of users exploring our website or prototypes) with UserBrain since a long time, but I wanted to give a try to moderated user tests.

Pingpong is a relatively new service, but their pool of testers is already quite diversified, meaning you can find users matching your criteria in a few hours at most. Everything is integrated into one platform (recruitment, scheduling, screen sharing for desktop and mobile devices, payment of the testers) which really makes it easy to get insights from potential users.

You can organize sessions with your own testers as well using Pingpong for scheduling and payment, but I find it too expensive in this set-up. For testing with our own users, I created a workflow combining Chatra, Calendly, Skype and Amazon Business (to send out vouchers to our users after the tests).

Google Sheets — Create complex spreadsheets

We use spreadsheets for everything at Monito

It may sound like a banal addition to this list, but Google Sheets is probably the most used tool of all at Monito. It’s even more powerful and versatile than what most people would expect, especially if you take advantage of the right Add-Ons and the most advanced functions.

I use Google Sheets to automatically fetch data from Google Analytics and combining it with our internal data model to create real-time custom dashboards.

We automatically collect data on exchange rates and fees from various websites using the IMPORTXML() function, we even scrape our own website to generate email templates based on our real-time results.

Google Sheets is also the “database” for many of our Zapier workflows. In the “quote request” example I mentioned earlier, inputs coming from the TypeForm are stored in a spreadsheet and the quote is calculated based on data from an external API via the script editor.

Smartmockups — Create product screenshots with just a few clicks

A screenshot of Smartmockups transformed into an image with Smartmockups #inception ;-)

Their one-time fee is one of the best investments I ever made. Their desktop tool allows you to create contextual images from your screenshots. It’s great to illustrate your new features and make your product more “real” in the eyes of your users, but it’s also very useful to create images with screenshots from other services.

We use it to illustrate the in-depth reviews we write about all the providers we list on Monito, and — of course — I used Smartmockups to make all the illustrations of this post.