Updates : What have we been up to? Lessons learned.

Good day all,

My name is Sung Park and I’m one of the founders of Rocket UI. First let me start by apologizing for the lack of updates on Rocket UI and this blog. So let me catch you up on what we’ve been up to and what we’ve learned.

Rocket UI is a project of love by two founders who love design tools. We’ve been working together for two years working on numerous web applications. The culmination of that is Rocket UI. Since the launch of Rocket UI we’ve learned some hard lessons. The hardest lesson we’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter what idea you have it’s all about the customers. If you’re reading this we mean you.

At the end of the day what matters is what you the customers want and delivering to fill your needs. To that effect we’ve been trying our best to listen to customer responses. In addition to this we’ve found that the one thing we are lacking is Business Development / Marketing skills. Sam Wan (the other founder) is a Engineer, Product / Project Manager and UX Designer. I am a UX designer with over 12 years of experience. Together we have over 20+ years of experience designing / creating design tools but zero years of experience when it comes to Marketing.

We’ve found that this is our greatest challenge. How can we find out what our customers want if we can’t even let our customers know that we are here. That we have a tool we would like them to try and provide us with feedback.

So we’ve adjusted our goals. Our main goal now is learning how to get an audience. An audience we can ask questions to. An audience we can get feedback from.

To this end I (Sung Park) have gotten a full time job over at Adobe as a Product Manager of Adobe Muse. As the Product Manager my job will be to determine the features and direction of the product. Talk to customers and eventually become the spokesperson for that product. I was very specific in requesting a role that was customer facing and not another design (UX, UI) position. I also stated that I wanted to continue work on Rocket UI. That if i was faced with a choice of either working for Adobe but not being able to work on Rocket UI I would pass on the opportunity to work for Adobe. Adobe has been amazingly kind in allowing me to join them as a Product Manager and continue work on Rocket UI.

I’ve been working at Adobe for about a month now. Working to learn my new role as Product Manager, thus the lack of updates on both RocketUI.com and this blog.

My goal is to work and learn at Adobe. Learn how to become a better Product Manager and become better at getting an audience, talking to customers, gathering feedback and of course coming up with tools which customers will love. Once I get settled into my new job I’ll be continuing to add to this blog as well as Rocket UI. I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.

Thank you again for trying Rocket UI. If you haven’t give it a try! Let us know what you honestly think of it. What you’d like to see added. What you didn’t like. Without feedback we can’t improve it and making Rocket UI into a tool you’ll love. Thank you again.

Sung Park
Founder + Designer of Rocket UI

Updates! We’ve added some new sections to www.RocketUI.com

hello hello! so we’ve made some new additions to www.RocketUI.com. we’ve added a tutorial section so you can see all the tutorials in one place (page) as well as an about us page which explains how Rocket UI came to be. how it wasn’t our first endeavor nor our second.

now that that’s done i’ll be working on making more tutorials using Rocket UI. we hope you like the additions and more importantly we hope that you’ll give Rocket UI a try and let us know what you think of it.

Rocket UI : Feedback Please!

last week we’ve made some updates to Rocket UI. before when you created your account or signed in you came to a blank screen. you had to either create a new project or open an existing project.

with this update when you create an account for the first time it’ll auto create your first project called ‘myfirstproject’ - we’re hoping this will improve our first run so that our users can play around with Rocket UI immediately.

this update is based upon feedback we got + what we saw during our Guerilla UX study.

the other addition has been adding tool tips to all the buttons. we noticed in our study that users were hovering over buttons to figure out what they did. 

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please, send us your feedback. let us know what features you like or would like. what works and what doesn’t work for you. what you found confusing. thanks again and i’ll be posting a new tutorial soon. ^_^

please send all feedback, questions and comments to support@RocketUI.com
thanks again! 

Update : Guerilla UX, Happy Hour with Gregory Veen & Numbers - Oh My!

i apologize for the lack of posts the last two days. we here at Rocket UI have been pretty busy with a few things and here’s what we’ve been up to.

01. Guerilla UX
we’ve been meeting with designers and just watching them use Rocket UI. from coming to the site to signing up for an account to creating their first Rocket UI widget.

what we’ve found is that because it’s a new application it takes them a bit of time to first figure out what all the options are and what they can do with Rocket UI. we found that they didn’t bother looking at the videos they went straight into it. we also found once they saw transitions in buttons they got really excited. after they had created their first widget we showed them some of the other features Rocket UI has - such as the ‘selected’ state in buttons. where buttons will automatically go to the ‘selected’ state when the url matches the url for that button. we also showed transitions. transitions on boxes, images and text. especially text.

you can create a simple text transition in minutes where you can change the display area, font size, bold, color and line-height (leading) and it will automatically create a transition between the two. they were very excited about that.

02. Happy Hour with Gregory Veen
completely unplanned. we’ve never meet Jeff or Greg Veen - two of the four founders of TypeKit. i just happened to come across Jeff’s video a few days ago which i posted here. it just so happened that my partner bumped into Greg and asked if he could spare some time before he flew back to the bay area to pick his brain.

we spent about 2 hours yesterday at Queen City Grill in Seattle to talk about startups, design tools and where it was going. it was great talking to Greg. he was very kind with his time and honest / open with his answers. if you ever get a chance to talk to Greg - do! his awesome.

03. Numbers
Rocket UI has been up for 17 days. in the past 16 days (we crunch numbers at the end of the day - midnight PST) we’ve found that our conversion rate of total visitors to total sign ups to be 12.64%. but considering that our site is also the portal for returning users we looked at new visitors to total sign ups and that came out to 19.32%

the way we got these numbers is simply by taking the total sign ups ÷ total visits and total sign ups ÷ new visits.

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next steps. we’ll be continuing our little Guerilla UX sessions with local designers in Seattle and improve Rocket UI based on our findings. if you’re a Seattle based designer who would like to participate or just give us feedback shoot us an email at support@RocketUI.com