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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

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. 

design part 2

Reshaping the design process with code – Part 2

As we are moving towards the end of 2019 we want to end the year with a vital product update. The update we are pushing out this time is a culmination of many months of hard work and dedication. We are greatly motivated by strong feedback-loops to seek out customer direction and converting the acquired knowledge into useful product enhancements. For this update particularly, we have been making sure that we cover as many requests, small or big, that you have requested over the last 4 quarters.

## Introduction to Reminders
One of the most requested features has been the ability to remind your customers about product actions. In fact, this has not only been requested by you but also end-customers who are looking for help on maintenance, usage and much more. 

We have studied this for some time, trying to get our head around what would be the best solution. A solution that is easy to use, easy to understand and has the appropriate impact. The solution we have built and are releasing does all that and more. 

![intro](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/3QCi2De6zVznPdvekZTWkV/56b359370ced3a1f2eca37c6935b23b4/intro.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

As evident to the above Reminder card, a Reminder is a container for an activity fully defined as: 

> A reminder is a time-based event to help customers perform certain tasks as a recurring event. 

To ensure a large array of customisation options a Reminder consists of following configurations:

- Title 
- Description
- Frequency in days
- Learn More

Finally, Reminders are grouped under every Language. Meaning it is possible to create language-specific Reminders targeting users segmented by their language preference. 

### What to "Remind" about
Reminders allow you to inform your customers about any action you find important for the customer to perform. We have gathered a few examples below:

Product maintanance
![Maintanence](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/30TDfeDm6wtMDTqsUF98LA/a298c01057044ebce4705aaf9c42285d/Maintanence.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

Proper product usage
![usage](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/RdmnZqG7120NjaAcisjcB/601ddde96da42cf426dc29a6cf8e38e4/usage.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

Product experience
![Experience](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/79gglferie7RvZsFKqbzmO/7f77ee58de5937775e7449d0e830880c/Experience.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

### The power of Reminders, Highlights & Topics
Informing customers about certain actions requires sometimes extensive information about what needs to be done, how to do it or more. To help with this need we allow Reminders and Highlights/Topics to be connected.

![maintanence card](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/1WgSiYTbuLPgB6iAjMmpuR/e0277c1d0595593a8814152e48a81dfa/maintanence_card.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

As shown in the example above the Reminder will display the Topic content upon the user request to Learn More. Only published Topics or Highlights can be connected to a Reminder. You can, therefore, use already available material to connect to the Reminder or create new.

### Reminders in the Assistant
After the Reminder is published it will be made available for all customers after they have registered their product. Moreover, Reminders will be displayed prominently on the Assistant home page under the Language from where it originates.

![score card](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/4MeT1uTByg1r1gaS5Jws6J/d75b6f54b6af4451c5e59e6144932145/score_card.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

When shown in the Assistant, Reminders are scored based on customer product ownership and Reminder due-diligence. In detail, Reminders conducted accordingly to the due cycle are positively impacting the score and vice versa when not accomplished within the due date. When a Reminder is due, the customer will be automatically notified about the Reminder Action point. 

In addition to the Reminders being shown in the Assistant, we are also simultaneously introducing 3 additional quick action toggles: Install, Registration and Updates. While the Install toggle allows the user to quickly install the Assistant on their devices, the Registration toggle allows quick product registration. As the last quick action toggle, the Update action allows the customer to enable receiving product updates. 

## Advanced Content Management
### Updated design
Another major request we have been getting throughout 2019 is greater content management control. One thing we have been getting, again and again, is the ability to group content, arrange content groups, filtering of published and drafted material, and easier language control. We have listened to your demands and made tons of changes to support your content management needs.   

### Toolbar
First thing you will notice is the new toolbar. The new toolbar is improved in look and features. Here you will be able to change languages, create a language, apply filters, add content and more.

![toolbar](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/2WNgTRwri2vrUkQckhIiJS/79fa544fa457a9cccf8980f934396c04/toolbar.png?w=1200&q=80)

As evident above you will now also have quick access for both Language and Experience settings, allowing you to conduct configurations quicker and easier. 

### Welcome "Categories"
With this update you are no longer bound to only one Category, instead, you can create as many categories as you need per Language and group content by simply drag and drop. 

![categories](//images.ctfassets.net/scrf7o05zai3/31nDozM2kKACsFQYeHoWoB/6724d0069bb141365e2029caf6ea7af3/categories.jpg?w=1200&q=80)

To create a new Category you simply use the toolbar Add function and thereafter select Category. Moreover, you can rename, remove or reposition categories by using the options menu found on every Category.   

### Autosave
Until now, upon every change, you have made when managing your Language content you were instructed to save, draft or publish changes. With this update, we are introducing Autosave on the main Language page. This will simply allow you to make changes without the need to save them. 

For Active (formally called Published) Languages, changes will automatically be saved and made available in the Assistant. On the other hand, changes made in Languages that are in-active (formally called Drafted) will be saved and only made public when the Language becomes Active. 

## Release date
We will be rolling out this release on Tuesday the 17th of December 2019. All features will be available for Free and Paid plans. Any content already created will be untouched and all active product Assistants will be automatically updated.   

And as always, if you have any questions or need help please [join our community](https://spectrum.chat/layerise "Layerise Spectrum Community"). 

Better insights - Product Announcements

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