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Since the last product update, we have been busy working on several great enhancements. While some of the improvements to the platform will be shared over the next couple of weeks and months, today we are excited to announce that from Thursday, October 24th 2019, all clients regarding active subscription plan, with be getting better Insights.

### __Better Insights better decisions__
One of the major benefits of Layerise is the easiness of data collection and the user-friendliness of data visualisation. After several rounds of revisions and testing, we are finally releasing much better Insights to track the performance of your Product Assistant's. We’re more than convinced that these aggregate data insights will help you continuously follow Product Assistants success and to further improve the customer experience.  

### __New features__
With this update to Insights, you will be able to quickly get short and long term performance measurements. On top of that, you will be able to see performance changes to all measured KPI's (Key Performance Indicators).

![Layerise Insights Since Beginning](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/CPYx38njZtJBKToXpVcez/1ca23cbec4e16d6b36872cfa91687ff5/zoom.png?w=1200&q=80)

#### Measured KPI's
Following KPI's are measured across all date ranges.

- Registrations 
- Customers
- Conversations
- Cost saved on paper (Layerise Product Assistant vs. conventional printed product manuals)

#### Date ranges
Following dates ranges and data granularities are available.

Date ranges and with daily data granularity
- Last 14 days   
- Last 28 days 
- Last 90 days

Date ranges and with monthly data granularity
- Since beginning 

#### Customers
One highly requested feature over the last couple of months has been the ability to measure product adoption by customer group and track product model registration. With this update, it is now possible to see product adoption down to the individual customer. This feature is supported by the Dialog customer & product satisfaction rate ([Read more](https://layerise.com/resources/blog/post/introduction-to-layerise-dialog "Layerise Satisfaction Rate")).

That’s all for this update. If you have any questions or need help please [join our community](https://spectrum.chat/layerise "Layerise Community"). As we move with 🚀speed we expect to be able to unveil something awesome already next week. Get the update directly [here](https://admin.layerise.com/new "Layerise Admin New").


Layerise Insights

Better insights - Product Announcements

Since our last product update, where we focused on [Reminders](https://www.layerise.com/resources/blog/post/say-hallo-to-reminders-product-announcements "Reminders"), we wanted to start the new year with enhancements that provide convenience and better oversight. For the January 2020 product update, we are introducing the Global Search and Customer Detail Pages. 

## Global Search
Until this moment, finding Topics, Experiences, Customers has been a less convenient activity then what we wanted to provide you with. We have therefore been tracking and performance testing several ways of solving your search needs. 

A part of the generic critical success factors (CFS) for providing search is search results accuracy and speed of delivery, coupled with results richness and presentation. We spent a good amount of time reviewing and tuning the search experience to maximise the overall solution. During this time we discovered that beyond the known CFS, the search feature is performing best when we consolidate all types of searchable indexes and archives. Instead of having dedicated search fields around the platform only focusing on one area at a time we have concluded that the best solution is to have a Global Search feature that serves all searchable articles.  

![Layerise Global Search](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/2MeRbE1oq2giunK25Ade7O/462f3d2eab5dc9e25948ca99c2401b71/search_clean.png)

You can now access Search by clicking on the search in the navigation menu. The searchable articles currently supported are: 
- All types 
- Customers
- Experiences
- Products
- Topics  

## Customer Detailed Pages
As an extension of our Global Search enhancement, where we made sure that Customers to searchable, as presented above, we also decided to spend time on enhancing the customer overview and management. 

![Layerise Search Customers](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/6j3w0CAqIigDwcLPdRRR90/1db49a423912d19f7805978534a5142f/customers_clean.png)

As evident to the image above, you will now be able to quickly and easily find customers by searching on: 

- First name *e.g.: Peter*
- Last name *e.g.: Thomson*
- Phone number *e.g.. 004721343211*
- Email *e.g.: peter.thomson47@gmail.com* 
- Country *e.g.: Finland*

Moreover, while you now can locate your customers based on the search query and search result richness as customer avatar or product tags, you now have the ability to also get full customer overview. Clicking on a specific customer in the search results will provide in-depth Customer Detail Page. 

![Layerise Customer Detail ](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/17PDFrEjqJtz2q6H5cgUz5/bc2ad97cbffaee9ba6fbd5d3bb143df4/customer_detail_clean.png)

The Customer Detail Page will show several key pieces of information aiming at giving you the best possible insights of the customer. Not only is the page going to present all the known identification data that the customer has decided to share with you it will also allow you to get an understanding of what products and how many product registrations the customer has including the unique serial number identifier. In addition to this, you will be able to get a time-line overview of the customer key interaction including:

- Customer signup date
- Customer product registration date
- Customer assistant engagement date

Finally, with the Detail Customer Page, we are also introducing the ability for you to reach out to your customers directly. Thus far, you have only been able to communicate with your customers if the customer reaches out to you with a question or a problem. We are changing that. In more detail, you will be able to send messages directly to the customer through your active Product Assistants. 

## Release date
We will be rolling out this release today Friday the 31th of January 2020. All features, excluding the direct messaging to the customer, will be available for Free and Paid plans. As always, if you have any questions or need help please join our [community](https://spectrum.chat/layerise/ "Layerise Community").

Layerise Customer Detail

January '20 Product Announcements

With 2020 in full swing and with 2019 behind us, we want to take a moment to reflect on what we, at Layerise, have achieved during the last 12 months. At the beginning of 2019, we outlined a product vision and an ambitious and aggressive execution roadmap, including all the features and functionality that we found essential to unlock even greater customer satisfaction.

## A year of growth and rapid product development
Looking back at our achievements in 2019, there is no doubt that we have taken a huge leap forward with our product, design and solution. Since Jan 2019, we have quadrupled the number of clients and have, at the same time, reached thousands of end-users across all seven continents with outstanding Product Assistant usage.

This is a noticeable acknowledgment of our platform, as this past year, we focused on unique end-user product experiences, increase in features and improved service value, and at the same time have done significant work to ensure that brands using our platform have the best-in-class tools and support. The work that has been accomplished has further enhanced our ability to support a wide range of product categories and improve customer post-sale experiences.

Our commitment to continually push updates and improvements, while at the same time work on enhanced platform architecture and data portability has allowed us to see significant positive returns both with clients and Product Assistant end-customers. At the same time, we have been hard at work promoting sustainable environmental choices while growing or expanding business ventures. We are therefore incredibly proud that more brands have decided to join Layerise’s efforts to minimise paper production and usage by utilising digital and smart Product Assistants to provide an even more excellent post-sales experience for their customers.

### Product Assistant growth
Layerise has been attractive and popular among brands with unique and smart products, making our Product Assistant solution a perfect fit for their efforts to provide their customers with the best product onboarding and guide. This alone has meant that customers are experiencing the full potential of their devices while using the Layerise-powered Product Assistant.

![Chart](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/13Kwf7PJV6JhUuyGNUcl0L/846d41aaacc2e4f04fab3c9c2907cad0/Chart.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

Since the day we started rolling out our Product Assistant Gen.1, we have seen impressive growth and adoption rates. During early 2019 customer growth and product, registration was driven by a small number of deployed Product Assistants. Still, as we moved into Q2 and throughout 2019, we have recorded doubling rates several times. It has been exciting to see customer adoption and the rate of which more and more customers are registering multiple devices. This growth translates into the evidence that customers are expecting better and more useful post-sales customer experiences and will, in the future, have more significant product onboarding requirements. Besides, every time a customer has used the fully digital Product Assistant in the past year, we have saved earth that incremental negative ecological trail that paper production, colour cartridges and distribution/shipment provide.  

## Making platform stakeholders happier
All parts of the Layerise platform and offering have been improved by great lengths. Over the last 12 months, we have doubled the team to execute faster and to return great productivity value for all platform stakeholders.

### Improved user experience
We started 2019 off by releasing the Product Assistant Gen.1. Since then, the Product Assistant has received more than 400 feature, performance and enhancement updates. In the same period, the Product Assistant UI has been renewed several times to cope with the increasing feature richness and to better adapt to the growing variety of customer usage patterns.

Here are a few screenshots from different points in the year to see the Product Assistant speedy progression:

![assistant evolution](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/3PXNIr2lTRWtNnRzmGLRNI/891de655a1d4306433e53d54426ab58a/assistant_evolution.png?w=1200&q=80)

As evident to the screenshots above, we ended 2019 with releasing the Product Assistant Gen. 2, which marked a new level of platform maturity. Among many enhancements during the year here are the most crucial:
- Customer & Product Registration: the best and easiest way for customers to register their product ownership.
- Highlights format: allowing customers to gain crucial product know-how and guidance with the “story” like Highlight format.
- Reminders: an effective time-based event to help customers perform specific tasks as a recurring event.
- Dialog: enabling brands and customers to engage in a smart and premium dialog without the need for exchanging basic ownership and product info.
- PWA install: helping customers to install the Product Assistant on their device without the Play Store and App Store hassle.  

### Admin work as a superpower
Equally, as with the Product Assistant, we have released more than 700 incremental Layerise Admin updates aimed at improved features, productivity score, and performance KPI’s. We have also taken significant steps in its platform architecture. As we have been pushing for broader data portability and making our offering easier to use, we have seen great feedback and recognition from brands and industries. Our focus to push effective, stable and powerful offerings has meant that brands, technical writers and customer service users have been able to provide customers with fantastic product experience value as evident below to the evolution of the Layerise Admin.

![admin](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/5TtgHspRRbfvLDo4JSCvj4/c04b367a73552fa04a6a3ea1d6ea289f/admin.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

2019's big successes include: 
- Product management: brands can automatically create Product Assistants and manage availability and identification. 
- End-to-end WYSIWIG: allowing technical writers to work within the same context as the customer will consume content. It allows for fast content creation and effective fine-tuning with insignificant revision loops.
- Customer reach: brands can, with ease reach out to any customer based on a variety of customer satisfaction signals. 
- Insights: easy and quick insight into customer demographics, customer product onboarding performance and product feedback/issue tracking
- Organisation API: provide the ability for any brand to use their content outside the individual Product Assistant and create other solutions.

## Funding and focus
Throughout 2019 we have frequently been asked about our decision to grow Layerise with a self-funded mindset, and with good reason as it’s somewhat easy to become mesmerised with a long line of zeros ticking from investors. But for us, it has been essential to remain grounded and keep our fingers on the adoption of our offering. Thus far, this has been an excellent decision for us, as we have been able to push ideas, make changes and test opportunities fast and without any concern for broader approval. Furthermore, while it’s given that funding injections can provide execution uplift, it also comes with its challenges and drag, something we thought would not benefit our product execution focus and plan. The 2019 growth has been primarily driven by a focus on personal sales and a keen eye on sustainable product delivery practices. Something that has provided us with tremendous knowledge throughout 2019, and which has been an instrumental part of our long-term product focus but allowed us to effectively navigate as we grow.

## 2020 plan! 
We have spent most of the last few weeks planning the 2020 roadmap. During the next year, we will be continuing our release practice with several updates going out every month, each focusing on known and new areas of the platform. 2019 has provided us with a long wishlist that we are currently mapping out. Among several innovative initiatives that we have started to design and test, we are going to work hard on building solutions that bring customers and brands even closer together. At the same time, our data has shown that customers are looking for collaboration and information exchange between them and other users of the same product. Finally, we are going to expand our platform into an ecosystem that embraces complementary solutions in our efforts to build the leading Product Assistant solution for brands.

## Thank you for your support!
We want to say Thank You! Thank you for your support and trust in Layerise. We have come a long way in 2019, and this has been due to your patience and belief in our ideas and solutions. This has now become a strong foundation for us to further develop outstanding products and provide even higher value through 2020. We don’t have any plans on resting.


Layerise year 2019 recap

2019 recap & 2020 outlook

In Part 1, we dug into how we began dreaming of a new and different design process at Layerise. How we feel the current process was too cumbersome. If you haven't already, please read [part 1](https://www.layerise.com/resources/blog/post/reshaping-the-design-process-with-code-part-1 "Part 1") before continuing. 

As we concluded in part 1, our goal was to move from a rigid waterfall process to a more fluid and team-wide process. To achieve this, we added some milestones on how to accomplish this:

- One source of truth. No more requests for newest version or work with an outdated design package version.
- Setting up version control (Semver). Help the team get familiarised with the changelog and provide complete autonomy over the upgrade process.
- Quick prototyping. Promote quick prototyping is essential and should be possible both through code and visual editors. 
- Dedicated playground. Have one place to showcase, document, and test the design system. 

### One source of truth
This is something every designer, product manager, and developer has experienced. It is not unusual to see memes and jokes about design files called final1.psd, final2.psd, thisisthefinal.psd. 
As we talked about in part one, there is no such thing as a final design. Design is iterative; hence having a file representing a design version isn't a good idea.

We looked into the developer tooling and solution landscape to seek out a solution. We were impressed by how open source and package registries allowed for a more open, shared and interactive truth without the loose of control or degradation of the truth. 

However, going down this route meant a quite big mindset change. Moving away from only visual editors into a programming editor is a big switch. Nonetheless, by utilizing a package registry, we can publish and update our *one source of truth* and allow the individual user the right amount of granular control by targeting specific versions.  Furthermore, this allows for a much closer relationship with our developers since they can create a design issue or make a pull request which is in line with how they work.  

### Version control
Many designers have hopefully been introduced to some version control, though usually, it's only the major version, like 1.0, 2.0, etc. In most cases, this is because design used to be done in a more vacuum-based process, where only UX, Product Managers, and Project Managers participated, and the end goal was a huge chunk of views/screens that needed to be updated and delivered. 

This needed to change, as having an one source of truth powered by a team-broad always-active design process, the number of major versions would naturally inflate. At the same time, the need for minor and patch updates are needed to allow for a more iterative process. Moreover, with an increase of version roll-out frequency, it is good practice that the participant of the design system understands what's been updated in each version. So whenever a major or minor version is bumped, looking into the changelog is required. On the other hand, with patch version bumps it is recommended to read up on changelogs as patch updates are pushed accessibility issues, bugs, and small visual tweaks. The official guidelines for Semver are defined as:

- (1.0.0) MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
- (0.1.0) MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
- (0.0.1) PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

### Quick prototyping
While having one source of truth stored as code packages is suitable for control and sharing, the need for a quick prototyping ability is still very essential in the design process. The need for scaffolding many different variations and flows for the user experience exist and is in many ways where the design team's most crucial task is. Yet, these prototyping methods are spread across many different levels of fidelity. 

The lowest level of fidelity is pen and paper or drawing on a whiteboard. This level allows the whole team to easily participate and is usually more of getting a common idea of what's needed, like a rough scoping. Depending on your teams' size, there can be multiple levels of fidelity after the first one, like wireframes. 

At Layerise, we still have the wireframing step, but it might be a bit different than other teams. Our wireframe step is merged with the design handoff step since we're have created a continuous integration with our design tools. If your visual editor of choice is Framer X, you can grab the newest design packages through our shared store, which auto-updates on every new version. Using Sketch or Figma? Then you can download the latest version of each design component through our design system platform (We'll dig into this further in the next paragraph). By having a continuous integration, we allow quick prototyping in visual editors with the newest design version available. 

### The design platform
In a traditional design process, the design usually lives in files. Though, this isn't the case with our setup. Since our interface and components live as code we needed a different solution. We're using [Storybook](https://storybook.js.org/ "Storybook") which allows us to document, test and design our design system. Storybook has add-ons built-in which in return allow us to test with real data, test for accessibility issues and responsiveness. 

With the way we use Storybook to handle our design library, the individual Layerise team member can learn about how to use each component, in which context and what tweaks that are available. Moreover, since our design now lives in Storybook, members of our team have the newest design at hand anywhere. In essence, the whole team can now instantly get the newest design whether its a component or a color tweak. They can furthermore read the changelog and get notified for new changes. 

Our new design process has been under development for the last year, and we're still tweaking the process to come closer to our goal of having one source of truth while the whole team can participate. We're very close and look forward to letting you get a deeper look into what the daily workflow looks like in part 3. 

Better insights - Product Announcements

Better Insights better decisions

New features

Measured KPI's

Date ranges

Customers

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