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Co-founder @ Pixel Together

Tuesday 25th February 2020

AUTHOR

Renae Turner

Do you ever find yourself at the helm of a ship sailing the high sea? Simultaneously you're navigating the charts, winding the sails, sweeping the deck and serving dinner to the crew?
 
If the answer is yes, you could be running an agency, startup or a small business. 

Today I’m talking about some tools of the trade you might want to consider. These subscriptions are the ones we use every week and help to keep our sanity and our buiness floating in the calmer waters.

1. Usability Hub

Usability Hub is brilliant. You design a test - be it around the service design, UX, UI of your product and then Usability Hub run the test right away, accessing as many people as you wish to pay for, right around the globe. I love it because there is so much you can study with respect to the varying demographics of people who are taking the tests. Not only do you gain understanding on what elements do and don't work for your site, you can also gauge it on what kind of people like/dislike certain elements. Which is useful for us because we have a number of different customer profiles. 

On top of that, there are many types of UX tests you can run. So this product is fabulous regardless of your level of experience of UX understanding. Maybe you want to get a feel for your new website outside of your mum or your boyfriend, or maybe you’re a company needing to A/B test a new landing page. Whichever way, you can run a test according to your requirements. 

Also, they have very attentive customer experience. After I ran a test, someone emailed me to see if there was anything else that could have been improved on. Ending on that note was a brilliant way to keep me feeling connected and positive about the brand… so much so I included them in this blog!

' That micro-interaction of drag and drop feels really good when it is attached to the feeling of completion. Possibly akin to how good it feels to hear the sound of deleting trash on a Mac '

2. Trello

Trello lets you make cool to-do lists, while assigning teams and channels to your tasks. I like it because there’s something extremely satisfying about dragging your completed item over to your ‘done’ channel. That micro-interaction of drag and drop feels really good when it's attached to the feeling of completion. Possibly akin to how good it feels to hear the sound of deleting trash on a Mac. Maybe Trello’s entire business rests on this feeling of accomplishment? Whatever the case, I’d be willing to bet that this key feature is part of why the tool is so successful.

4. Chartmogul

This is where we measure our money. We're a subscription based service, so Chartmogul is awesome for looking at monthly cash coming in, cashflow over time, MRR and ARR. I’m a visual person. For me, I appreciate the graphical nature of this tool. The dashboard is a graph over time with a spreadsheet below - so it’s visual backed up by hard numbers. It’s so easy to cross reference and double check things and drill down into all sorts of details about your monthly progress, like; how much has your business expanded or contracted ; how much churn versus new business; how much returning business have you had and then other useful information on the demographics of your paying customers. 

My co-founder Simon like it because its very accurate and it means we don't have to create a number of different spreadsheets ourselves. 

'Simon uses Slack for organising feature releases, #madeinpixel sites, inspiration - essentially for chats in the business that are ongoing and ones that can be added to over time'

5. Slack

At first I was pretty 'meh' about Slack. Another communcations channel? No way! However, my team love it and when I finally got on board I was suprised to be delighted. Sweet UX always makes me feel good, organised and calm. So the fact that the learning uptake time for Slack is very very small, it looks super slick and the talking tone is friendly…Slack kept my focus for longer than 10 seconds. Nowadays, I'm in there with a zillion channels flying and I find it easy to organise our team chats thematically. Compared to gmail, it’s not as messy. So if you have a project or a team of more than say 3-4 people I definitely think it’s worth a look.

Simon uses Slack for organising feature releases, #madeinpixel sites, inspiration - essentially for chats in the business that are ongoing and that can be added to over time.

6. Pixel Together

I say the magic in Pixel lies in its freedom and flexibility. Even though I'm co-founder of Pixel, I probably still class myself as a Content Producer first  - so I’m used to working in video, text, image and Adobe. Pixel works for me because essentially I can manoeuvre all my assets just the way I like. Is Pixel techy? Well, if you’re not ofay with any visual design tools such as Adobe, Sketch, Canva or even Powerpoint then it could be a bit of a leap and it would be worth spending some time in our YouTube channel or Help Library. However, if you are up with any of those tools, it’ll be an absolute cinch. Plus we’re always a quick message away if you need to speak to a real person and get some help.

AUTHOR

Published: 

Tuesday 25th February 2020

Co-founder @ Pixel Together

Renae Turner