Digital Product Insights

Every customer comes with their own idiosyncrasies, rendering every “best practice” of yours ineffective. Even so, you can take cues from attributes across the landscape of SaaS users and narrow down trends. This process isn’t as hard as you believe it to be, neither will it prove as easy as you would like it to be. There’s no way around it. The success of your SaaS product relies on your understanding of your buyer, whether you're trying to expedite your lead generation or send your conversion rates sky-high.

Offshore software development entices companies with their exciting cost savings potential and faster turnarounds. Outsourcing has seen both successful and unsuccessful projects. Even so, a lot of companies hesitate to take the leap and outsource because of the stigma attached to it.

Outsourcing, the very word for many paints a picture of offshore labor cranking out shoddy code at bargain basement rates. Despite the stigma attached to outsourcing, many still choose to outsource. This is because most companies are bound to gain a competitive advantage by cutting their costs. Bad outsourcing decisions usually trace back to not putting different vendors through a well-designed selection process.

Today, your developers can write extremely sophisticated tests using Test-driven development style (TDD) and Behavioral-driven development style (BDD), along with making use of powerful test frameworks, using gems like RSpec and Cucumber. Rails by default comes with robust automated test capabilities, making it easy to write your tests.

As agile methodologies started amassing across the board adoption, you’ll find enough platforms online debating whether it’s the truly superior method or not. Most would have you believe, Agile is the way to go, while others argue about the benefits of adopting the Waterfall methodology. Today, we refuse to partake in this debate, because this war has no winner. You see, when you boil down to it, neither the Agile method nor the Waterfall method is inherently better than the other. Hence, do not expect to find any easy answers here. Instead, we’ll arm you with information about both Waterfall and Agile methodologies. By the end, you will have yourself reached an informed decision about what’s best for you.

The internet houses all the answers we seek. This celebrated medium is dense and sometimes, chaotic. Nevertheless, I’ve always found the answers I sought. The credit belongs to usability and familiarity. As you hover over your keyboard, all set to type, your fingers will do the work without any need for your eyes to leave the screen. All it takes is a blue, underlined word or phrase for you to recognize a hyperlink. We are regular visitors on the web, so our senses are familiarized with the standard visual cues and patterns, allowing us to navigate huge volumes of data in seconds seamlessly. If you want to be found amongst this maze and more importantly, transform into an everyday habit of your users, a well developed User Interface is crucial. Then again, you understand this. Hence, your presence on our page today.

You’ve designed a wonderfully self-contained web application, built to run on web browsers, unlike the kind of application your users would download from an app store. In your scenario, your application needs to find a home on the Web. In other words, it needs a Web address so your users can access your application through it, along with storage for your app’s code and associated background and data support to ensure traffic spikes won’t be able to whack it offline.

Irrespective of the platform your developers choose for deployment, there are some general checklists to be followed apart from the steps you’ll follow for the environment selected. From the outset, you’ll have to make the following choices:

Why cache? In a nutshell, caching can speed up your Rails application. Especially with Ruby, a language which isn’t very fast, caching is essential. Your developers probably hear the word “cache” a lot, it happens to be a French word and translates to mean “to hide.” Caching is storing a particular amount of data generated during the request-response cycle in a cache and reuse it while responding to similar requests. This means the requests your users make in the future are fulfilled a lot faster since there’s no need to produce the very same data once again. Nearly all Rails applications, serious about performance could use more caching. This caching must be done intelligently though, to achieve fast server response times.

We talk about this generation of users and their rising intolerance towards a five-second delay in loading a page or towards a few too many notifications and ads. You see, but the changes haven’t only been on your user’s end, your developer’s too, expect a lot more out of the tools they choose to embrace. Instant gratification is making our generation perpetually impatient. Back in the day, the client- side of your application would’ve been a wafer-thin layer of HTML, cookies, query parameters, and request headers. Your server would have ended up shouldering all the heavyweight. This meant a single request of the website would be responded to, by displaying the entire web page.

Today smartphones are ubiquitous. With it the application landscape has undergone a revolution, churning out a large number of applications to keep up with the user's needs and wants. Businesses are increasingly finding it necessary to have an application to remain relevant and connected with their users. Additionally, your user’s handset has progressed beyond an application working in its confines. Applications now work in tandem with wearable tech, vehicles, and home appliances. Your developers are facing their challenges, but your testers are dealing with no less. With the evolving context, we work in today, a one-fits-all solution is a thing of the past.

Ruby on Rails is a great framework for you to build web applications easily and have it running in a small amount of time. It’s emphasis on certain principles like convention over configuration and Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) makes the development process faster, but no advantage indeed comes without paying the price for it. We often make decisions in our development cycle which may seem immaterial then, but later on prove to be crucial enough to bring your application’s performance down. Also, we tend to go lazy on the proper care and attention our web applications need to keep them running efficiently. This means your users end up having to contend with security issues, slower pages, and enough error message screens to push them over to your contenders.

Great design is the only thing differentiating your software-as-a-service (SaaS) product from the products and services offered by your competitors. Just because your SaaS product is beautiful doesn’t mean it’s usable. Great design balances a great user experience (UX) with a great looking user interface (UI) to create a holistic product experience, wowing your customers and turning them into your biggest advocates. Your UI defines how your product looks and your UX defines how your product works. Both are important, but all too often SaaS product owners make a fatal mistake by focusing exclusively on the look and feel instead of placing equal emphasis on usability and aesthetics.

Ruby on Rails is emerging as a leading player for building enterprise-level web applications. You can picture Rails as a box of development tools, lending your developers the necessary framework to structure their codes in. Thanks to the presence of open-source software libraries, known as RubyGems, startups too will find it a perfect framework for building their websites. Rails is designed keeping the best programming practices in mind, so it almost guides you into writing good code for your backend. It does this by stressing on convention over configuration, which is then codified as Rails API.

Google Photos is the first to bring image recognition features to the public. It relies on pattern matching algorithms and image classification. This is the technology which makes it possible for us to search for photos containing a particular landmark or object.