Archive for Internet Startups

Personapp for creating quick & easy customer profile

personapppage

Personapp is a tool for creating a quick & easy persona that includes traits describing your targeted customer profile.

Instead of creating a whole section in a business plan report, you can simply use Personapp to create the persona of the kind of person your products or services will appeal to.

It’s simple enough, if you focus on 4 to 5 five key goals (demographics, needs & goals, behaviors, etc) & wrap it up in a single page.

Start with the targeted persona’s age, job, family, hobbies & interests, where they live, etc. Add a name & a picture, to make it seem like a real user instead of a market research report.

Describe a typical day in the life of your persona, focusing on behavioral patterns that are relevant to your product being of interest to them. List about 5 of their needs, & common problems & tasks this persona often has to face.

You can round out the persona with beliefs & attitudes, relationships, skills, work environment, etc. It’s not rocket science & you can just as well do it with pen & paper, but using Personapp does offer some valuable advantages.

For starters, you can create multiple personas with different traits & then tweak or combine them based on in-depth user interviews & further analysis of market research data about your customers & those of your competitors.

It’s far easier to use Personapp & collaborate on these changes Online as you & others involved in the project do more research narrow down the persona to specifics.

Secondly, it makes you focus on real users & what they think about your product, instead of business models, traffic & software. It makes design decisions more human & less abstract, & will help you develop clear need statements before getting started with product development.

Personapp was developed & launched in Jan 2012 by Laurence McCahill, Brighton, U.K.-based co-founder of The Happy Startup School, Spook Studio.

Image Credit: Personapp

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Converse.js chat client lets you integrate multi-user chatrooms with your Website

new chat app

Converse.js is a free & open source XMPP chat client that lets you integrate single-user chat as well as multi-user chatrooms with your website.

There’s no dearth of chat client providers offering chat scripts, widgets & apps that allow you to add a single-user chat on your Website. It’s usually used as a live help tool that enables Web masters or company representatives to talk to Website visitors & customers live & one-on-one.

But Converse.js goes a long way further beyond the basic Facebook type of chat. In addition to authentication & contact groups, users also have multi-user chat rooms that enable your customers & Website visitors to chat among themselves.

It’s a simple & no-cost method to create a community of users engaged in dialogue with you & between themselves, instead of just website visitors who come & go & don’t interact with anyone.

Apart from registration & the ability to accept/decline contact requests & create contact rosters & groups, your users will be able to use features that include vCard support, custom chat status messages, typing notifications & off-the record encryption.

Oh, & it can be translated into 14 languages. You can also set up a common authentication process, where users who have already logged into your website will automatically be logged into the chat server.

The chat client runs in standard Web browsers & can easily be integrated into any website. It can connect to any accessible to any accessible XMPP/Jabber server from public providers like jabber.org. You can, of course, set one up yourself too.

You can integrate Converse.js with other frameworks such as Plone, Django, Roundcube, Patternslib & Alfresco. It’s even available as a WordPress blog plugin.

Converse was developed by South African software developer JC Brand.

Image Credit: Converse

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