With Use It Better™ Free Plan, you can record and replay user actions on your Flash website (ActionScript 2 or 3). We will record up to 50 user sessions a day for a Free account. To start, visit Plans and Pricing page and follow the instructions.

We are working very hard on Paid Plans, which are still in Beta. Paid Plans will have much more functionality as described on Plans and Pricing page. If you would like to participate in free testing of the Paid Plans, sign up for our continued Beta.

Below you will find agenda of Lukasz Twardowski who is Creative Director at Cookie and our project leader. If you are coming to Max and want to hook up, mail him: l ( at ) cookie.pl

Sunday, Oct 4th

SoDA 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
SoDA Adobe Max Digerati Mixer

Monday, Oct 5th

Adobe Max 9:30 am – 11:00 am
General Session at Nokia Theatre L.A.

Adobe Max 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Digital Agency Best Practices Presented by SoDA

FITC 12:30 pm – 1:00 pm
“Step Away from the Computer” by Joshua Hirsch

Adobe Max 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
GPU Acceleration in the next Flash Player

SoDA unConference 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Ethics and Issues: The Dark Side of the Digital Agency Business

FITC 3:30 pm – 4:00 pm
“Custom Event Reporting from Flash to Google Analytics” by Joseph Labrecque

Adobe Max 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
What’s New In Flash Player

SoDA unConference 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Masters’ Class: Designers and Devs from top shops in the country discuss their craft.

Adobe Max 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Workflows for the Flash Platform

Adobe Max 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Meet the Teams

Tuesday, Oct 6th

Adobe Max 9:00 am – 10:00 am
What’s New In Flash Player

SoDA unConference 9:30-10:30
Debate – Rich Media vs. Standards: Is Flash right for your site or your client?

Adobe Max 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
General Session at Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE

Adobe Max 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
The Business Value of User Experience

FITC 4:30-5:00
“Large, Physical, Flash” by Thomas Wester

Adobe Max 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Agile and UX: An Unholy Alliance?

FITC 5:00-5:30
“Flash-Jazz-Combo” by André Michelle

Adobe Max 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Sneak Peeks and 2009 MAX Awards Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE

Adobe Max 8:00 pm – 11:00 pm
MAX Bash TBD

Wednesday, Oct 7th

Adobe Max 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Top Secret Flash Player Session

Adobe Max 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
A Deep Dive into Ten Innovative Projects for Flash

FITC 11:30-12:00
“Visualizing Voice: Using the Flash Microphone for advanced interaction” by Chuck Freedman

Adobe Max 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Roadmap: Flash Platform Servers and Services

FITC 3:00-3:30
“User-Centric Design within the Digital Agency” by Sean Scott

Adobe Max 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Panel Session: Combining Great Design with Technology to Engage Customers

Adobe Max 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Tackling Memory and Performance in Flash, Flex, and Adobe AIR

Who are you?

Majority of sign-ups (91%) came from digital agencies like us, which was quite predictable. 46% of you declared that analysis are very important part of your work, quite often admitting (10%) that you don’t use any tools to analyze Flash projects.

We are happy to say that we got quite many sign-ups from developers of Flash web apps. Among them are some of the coolest apps around as well as new-comers.

Where are you from?

To our surprise, 46% of our Beta subscribers come from Europe and only 30% from US and Canada.

What is your position?

What is your agency size?

What is yours or your company Adobe Flash proficiency?

The least advanced groups (or the modest ones) are freelancers and large agencies. If to believe this survey, the best ratio Flash guru per employee can be found in medium sized agencies.

Which ActionScript version do you use?

Old boy AS2 is still catching up. AS3 runs way faster for sure, but it doesn’t translate to development speed. Wonder what will be the future of scripting in Flash knowing how many people appreciate the ease of coding with AS2?

Freelancers and large agencies use AS2 the most often and that corresponds to the previous question.

What kind of Adobe Flash websites do you make?

Flash is keeping the leading role in advertising microsites production, and to our surprise in web apps development. It’s low adoption in e-commerce shows that there is possibly a lot of problems in that area that Use It Better can address.

What traffic do your websites generate? (visits a day)

We will soon have to decide what recording limits should be set for Use It Better plans. During the beta we record every single session, but public version will use random sampling.

Which technologies do you use?

We can clearly see that video and 3D are really on a hype these days.

Did you hear about Cookie?

Vast (74) percent of Beta subscribers state they’ve never heard about Cookie, the developer of Use It Better. That’s great, because it means that not only our friends and family have signed up for the Beta. On the other hand… where the hell have you been for the last few years? :)

Which feature are you the most interested in?

The most important conclusion is that you actually are interested in Use It Better functionalities :) We are happy that you find visits replay so interesting, because it’s our core feature, but your interest in analysis is are also great because we have zillions of ideas on analytics features.

What tools do you use to analyze Flash websites?

I guess we reached the most important question. Most of you are using Google Analytics (often with deeplinking) but the message we get is clear – GA is not enough to measure Flash websites. We even got some voices from agencies which avoid Flash just because they can’t analyze it properly.

Omniture doesn’t satisfy you neither and it’s market share is significantly lower then Google Analytics’ not only because GA is free but also because it’s easier to integrate. You named several other tools you use, but their popularity is very limited. Some of you were desperate enough (as we were) to develop your own solutions.

Anyway, 20% of you don’t use any tools at all. How do you analyze your websites then?
]]> http://useitbetter.com/beta-survey-results/feed/ 3 http://useitbetter.com/beta-progress/ http://useitbetter.com/beta-progress/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:19:34 +0000 Cookie http://www.useitbetter.com/?p=458 Some of you may be interested in how is Beta going on and what are the new developments.

First of all we would like to say big THANKS to all of you who send feedback. We have learnt a lot.

The most popular request we get from you is to enhance Replay module to enable rewinding or skipping to a specific point in time. It’s not that easy and, to be honest, quite impossible to make, because the replay works on a real website. But we are working hard on a Fast Forward feature, which we hope you to find satisfying. It will enable you to reach interesting moments in a replay faster by increasing the speed of mouse movement or even skipping mouse movement at all.

You also asked us to make filtering a little easier. Now in uPanel you can find a little magnifying glass icon next to an event or a session attribute. It allows you to find specific visits with just a single click.

Of course there were some bugs you reported. Hopefully, we have eliminated them.

We’re looking forward to more feedback from you. We are especially curious of your thoughts on our ActionScript framework. Tell us… do you find it hard to make Use It Better work?

The service preview gives access to 3 demo sites. You can play with them and then see the exact replay of your session. You can also log in to our uPanel to see your session among all the sessions recorded so far.

If you have already signed up to Use It Better™ beta and you’re curious to see it in action, just go check your mailbox. If you haven’t decided to sign up yet, why not sign up now?

The beta will launch very soon, so stay tuned and feed us back!

There is still a lot to do, but it seems that current version is quite stable and have all the crucial functionalites. We are happy to invite all of you to sign up for beta testing.

Cookie, as a web shop, has been constantly trying to push forward interaction and bring some fresh ideas to user experience. Our portfolio includes many Flash projects which may be thought to be too bold or too demanding for users.

Everybody knows the sentence “Don’t make me think”. But everybody’s common sense says that a lot can be done with just a single sparkle of thoughts. We believed that to expect a little effort from the user is the best way to deliver him custom-shaped experience, far better then a typical don’t-make-me-think-dot-com.

How could we know that what we do is right. How to answer questions like “Will it work for our clients?”, “How can we tell people are not getting lost on this site?”. Of course we had our experience and intuition. But we needed a proof.

Few years ago we came up with an idea of recording and replaying user sessions. We thought it to be a holy grail of all usability focus group tests. No paid testers, no complicated machinery, but real thousands of users in real situation – sitting in front of their computer on the way to get what they want – information, products or just entertainment.

Since there was no software like this, we at Cookie have decided to implement our own ideas into software that we could share with other agencies that face the same problems as we did.

The idea became real and got its shape two years ago. It was very rough, yet working. We decided to share it with industry last year. But we missed the deadline. Sorry. Now, 6 months later, we are ready to present Use it Better™.