Hi everyone, I’m Matt — the Director of Technology here at Userplane. As the longest-tenured Userplaner in the building, I’ve seen our technology change quite a bit over the years. And now, it has been almost a year since we made the decision to revamp the platform. A great many hours of planning and development later, we are seeing the first stages of the new product come online in a meaningful sense. So we felt it was a decent time for reflection and also sharing some of the back story on how we got here.

Over the years we have been fortunate enough to work with some truly great partners, some of which have been with us since the very beginning. Those partners have been a key component in how we shaped this new platform based on feedback and requests over the years, as well as direct involvement early on in the planning process. After analyzing what we heard, there was one thing that came through loud and clear: user analytics and metric-based measurement. We have built this new system with the detailed measurement of what is successful and what isn’t in terms of user engagement at its very foundation. These tools allow publishers to simply add variant testing and measurement of any aspect of engagement that Userplane provides.

Moving beyond the ability to determine success in a quantifiable sense we looked at the second biggest piece of feedback, which was the rigidness of our existing UI, and made flexibility our primary goal from a user experience perspective. In building the new platform and products we decided an SDK was the right approach rather than a series of apps. Breaking up the experience into its individual components provides a more consistent and easier-to-manage code base on our end, as well as a far more flexible UI. The new UI is truly designed to build social experiences based on the particular needs of the use case, without having to go through a whole new application development cycle.

We are very excited about the technology, direction and vision we have for the product, and what it will mean for our publishers from a user experience standpoint. In addition, we feel the new platform as a new way to drive engagement and even generate new revenue streams.

As it just so has it I will be in London this week for the FutureOfWebApps.com conference so feel free to reach out to me @userplaneMatt if you’d like to sync up and hear in more detail about what we’re doing.