Building the best products requires facilitating feedback from your entire organisation. Frontend development is the journey of bringing an idea to reality. This is incredibly complex and requires both collaboration and iteration. It is the intersection of development, design, branding and performance and, therefore, cannot be a linear process.
Customers' expectations are constantly increasing and products need to be more than just ‘okay’. Delivering on these expectations requires your entire organisational village to be involved. Your team is already full of people with varied experience, knowledge, skills and expertise. The more these abilities can be harnessed and utilised, the better your products will be.
Preview Links make this collaboration simple.
Preview Links
Software development has traditionally existed inside a ‘black-box’, with visibility restricted to those who can write code themselves. This means that there has been very few ways other stakeholders were able to provide guidance.
The majority of teams have opted for one of the following two bad options to overcome this:
1) interrupting a developer to discuss a problem, which hurts momentum, or
2) waiting to provide feedback when the feature is almost complete, at which point it is often too late for any meaningful change to occur.
Enabling and encouraging feedback to occur earlier and more regularly in the development process is paramount to building products that your customers will love.
Getting timely and frequent feedback from your entire team throughout the development process will allow a significant reduction in developer re-work. Preventing re-work allows for a faster development process and enhances your product to market time, which in turn saves costs.
A Preview Link allows you to share your work in progress with any of your stakeholders; product managers, marketing, the CEO and even external customers by just providing them with a URL.
Bring the people who use the end product, into the product building process.
Why does this matter?
Having the people who are using the tech also be involved in creating it, is critical to ensure that what we build is the right thing. This inclusiveness is the crux of building amazing products, products that are useful, safe and inspiring for the widest possible range of people.
Preview Links allow you to get feedback from all of the people that matter in a timely manner.
Bringing more diversity into the development process means bringing a diversity of approaches, experiences, minds, and ideas. This allows teams to look at problems from a variety of angles and produce a more considered solution, a better product.
How do Preview Links work?
Every single code commit has a unique URL for every backend. This means that an automatically generated URL can easily be shared to the entire team. They can just click on the link, interact with the product and then comment and provide feedback on it.
“Screenshots are ok, videos are good, but nothing beats actually using a feature when it comes to giving feedback.”
— Tim Bray, CTO of Sitemate
Digivizer Case Study
Digivizer started using Linc to enable easier testing of its multi-platform, real-time analytics software in production, but discovered that the real benefit has come from using Linc to reduce time in getting a new feature to market, by being able to collaborate across the company. By using Linc’s preview links, the work that the development team was doing could be shared in a simple way with the broader company, including the analytics and business development teams. This sharing of URLs allowed for quicker feedback loops across the organisation.
"Linc has streamlined our design and development process, and given us super-fast deployments. Which has changed how our team, and even our entire business, operates."
— Rob Sharp, Technology Leader of Digivizer
Read the Digivizer case study in more detail here.
