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How We Make Products Better

Common sense dictates that awesome features, the right price, and ease of use are how you create products that people love.

But there’s something else that’s just as (or probably even more) important: Talk to the people you’re building for.

At Mitter.io, we have been doing just that, over the past few weeks. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the process, the things we learned, and the road ahead for a product that’s specially designed for the developer community.

We’ve always referred to Mitter.io as a platform that’s “built for developers, by developers.” Understanding developers, how they work, and their preferences when using a dev platform, have all factored into how we designed and built Mitter.io.

Therefore, interacting with this community on a regular basis helps us build products that people can make the most of.

We’ve been reaching out to developers from across the world to hear their thoughts on the entirety of Mitter.io — from the platform and people’s experience using it, to even our website and documentation.

The objective of the entire process was to listen to what people have to say about us — positive feedback, an earful about our gaffes, excitement, or just a ‘meh, don’t really care.’

Finally, this little exercise gave us some essential perspective on how people look at what we’ve created, and what we can (and need to) do better.

There are multiple ways of reaching out to developers, and each one serves a different purpose. Let’s start with the basics — leveraging our existing circle.

Reaching out to the developers we already knew — friends, family and old colleagues — was an obvious start. We could rely on them for honest feedback and relevant pointers based on their knowledge of who we are and what we’re trying to achieve.

We leveraged our first-degree network to contact developers who had no connection to us. The fact that we work out of a co-working space also enabled us to reach out to a lot of talent that was just an arm’s length away.

We could rely on this group for an objective opinion about Mitter.io; on whether our website clearly laid out our offering; and whether our documentation showed them exactly how to work with the platform.

A while ago, we held our first online hackathon, Mitter.io /Code. Registrations went through the roof, but the final participation itself left something to be desired.

We figured the reasons could either be that our participants just didn’t have enough time, or that they had problems working with the platform. When we reached out to some of them, both our suspicions were confirmed:

While some couldn’t fit the task into their busy schedules, others said that the documentation didn’t offer them enough clarity on some parts of the platform.

Based on our learnings, we mentored some students at a 24-hour college hackathon, where we also gave the crowd a quick introduction to Mitter.io.

While the hackathon itself was fantastic and rich in ideas, we realized that students were having a hard time using our platform.

And that matters, because student developers are just as important as the professionals. This also showed us that there’s room for improvement if devs want to use our platform in a high-pressure environment like hackathons.

Every interaction with a developer, whether a student or a professional, gave us a lot of perspective on where we’re ahead, where we’re lacking, and where we might be making things harder for the people who want to use Mitter.io.

We’ve categorized these learnings into three functions:

This was probably the most cited issue, with some people even telling us that they just couldn’t understand what Mitter.io is. Some developers said that the information on our website wasn’t enough and failed to hold their interested.

It was clear that we need to call out more of the features and functionalities that our product offers, and also explain what Mitter.io is in the simplest way possible.

Other developers also made us aware of the problems with our documentation; specifically referring to how they couldn’t understand certain sections or felt we were taking too long to get to the point.

What we need to do now is provide our audience better clarity on what they can do and achieve with our product, and how to do all of it.

Developers value their time. We should too.

It’s not that they don’t want to try out new stuff; it’s that they’ll give it only so long before it starts eating into their schedule. For us, that circled back to the lack of clarity in our documentation, and in some cases, issues using some of our APIs and features.

We pride ourselves in creating a messaging platform that offers developers so much power and flexibility; but sometimes, all of those semantics and new tooling can leave people perplexed.

We’ve been deliberating over that particular problem for a while.

Mitter.io is young and brings some completely new constructs and features to the realm of chat. And while it always takes time for people to familiarise themselves with a new product, there are steps that we can take to make the process easier.

The developer who made that statement went on to give us some very valuable thoughts on how we could make our website better.

We were so focused on keeping the website short (ironically, to keep it simple) that we forgot to account for the complexities that could lead to anyway!

A key learning was in the realm of jargon — nobody likes it, but sometimes, it’s a necessary evil. Those times, backing it up with enough explanation or examples can ensure that people take away tangible information and not just hard-to-decode statements.

It quickly became obvious that we need to rethink our entire website — from the language, to how we explain concepts, and how we talk about the platform and its features.

Simplicity is now our focus — even if it means a few extra scrolls.

It’s refreshing to hear so many different perspectives and opinions about what we’re doing and the product we’ve built. Some make us smile, others make us wonder how we could be so stupid, but all of them teach us something new — that there’s always a better way.

That’s why, as of last week, we’ve started making some crucial changes:

Our website is usually our first point of contact, and content that leaves visitors scratching their heads is unacceptable. That’s why we’re redoing the whole thing. The new website will be going live soon (or is already live, depending on when you’re reading this).

We’ve reworked the entire structure, ensured the content flows better, taken a bit more space to provide explanations where people might need or expect them, and detailed more features. We’ve built it in-house, and while it’s no “blow-your-mind” big-budget website, we think this is a step ahead in the right direction.

Our documentation is where developers head to make sense of how to use our platform. That means every part needs to be up to the task — in terms of clarity, structure, coverage, and simplicity.

We’re in the process of overhauling our docs, including switching up the sections, standardizing the overall language and terminologies, simplifying how we talk about Mitter.io and its relevant concepts and even adding in new sections that bring the doc to parity with everything that our platform offers.

Talking to developers has been one of the most significant exercises we’ve undertaken. But this isn’t a one-time thing — it has to be a constantly active process. That’s why we’ve created a Slack channel where you can reach out to our core team directly.

If you’re a developer or know one who’s always up for trying out something new and unique, do check out Mitter.io. We think you’ll love the platform and the kind of apps and experiences that you can build with it.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on Mitter.io, what you like, what you don’t, and hear suggestions for how we can improve. Here’s to building a community that’s for developers, by developers.

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