lshepstone's comments

Oxford, UK | Wayin | Senior Software Engineer | ONSITE, https://www.wayin.com

Wayin is a campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, helping them build consumer facing interactive applications and is used by household name brands to run high volume marketing campaigns. We're a growing startup with offices in Oxford, London, New York & Sydney and an HQ in Denver, CO and we think we have a roadmap with some really interesting stuff to work on.

We are looking for Senior Backend or Full Stack Engineers to be based in Oxford, UK.

Our stack is Java, Groovy, Vert.x, Grails, Redis, ElasticSearch, MySql on the backend and React, Redux, Webpack, ES6, LESS, Yarn on the frontend.

Sound interesting? Contact us at [email protected]

Wayin | Senior Software Engineer | Oxford, UK | ONSITE, https://www.wayin.com

Wayin is a campaign management platform for marketers and agencies, helping them build consumer facing interactive applications. Our platform is used by enterprise household names to run high volume marketing campaigns. We are a growing startup with offices in Oxford, London, New York & Sydney and an HQ in Denver, CO and we think we have a great roadmap with some really interesting stuff to work on.

We are looking for:

- Senior Frontend Engineers (Oxford, UK and Denver, CO)

- Senior Backend or Full Stack Engineers (Oxford, UK)

- Infrastructure Lead Engineer (Oxford, UK)

- Senior QA Engineer (Denver, CO)

Our stack is:

-Backend: Java, Groovy, Vert.x, Grails, Redis, Kafka, MySql

-Frontend: React, Redux, Webpack, ES6/Babel, LESS, Yarn

Sound interesting? Contact us at [email protected]

It's actually a very clever way to seed access to their honeypot.

The choice of Stellenbosch in South Africa as an example is perhaps not ideal. While SA may be a third world country in parts, it is very "first-world" in others and has a GDP greater than Denmark, Finland, Singapore and Ireland. Stellenbosch is also one of the countries premier Universities. I am not sure we'd be as surprised if Universities from those countries were chosen as an example.

I'm sure it's more of a case of Elsevier charging whatever it could to each university.

Speaking as a South African, you do not want to go to prison there. People try to avoid it at all costs. Corruption is rife, and reports have surfaced of guards selling sexual access to prisoners amongst other unpleasant activities.

Just 4-5 years ago most Telco's were building portals and walled gardens where they were licensing the content themselves (or even had teams creating it in house) and selling it in various ways to their customer base. So never mind a 30% cut, they were competing with content producers. If you were trying to sell content the Telco was hoping to sell forget a 30% cut, you couldn't even get on their platform and you earned a big fat $0.

If you really were lucky they'd decide to let you on but would take a 50/50 or 60/40 revenue share.

30% is starting to seem not so bad...compared to that at least.

You've missed the point. Apple is providing access to hundreds of millions of potential customers who can purchase your product in a frictionless manner. The people on this platform spend more $ per person than other ecosystems because the platform is easy to use and has the widest choice of product. That makes the platform very valuable.

If it was so easy to get this kind of distribution, then why don't you just develop an Android app and put it up on your website and watch the millions of users roll in? Oh wait, there aren't hundreds of millions of customers searching for apps on your website?

A user base, especially one that spends more $ per person that another, is extremely valuable. Historically this kind of access to a large distribution platform was just not available to mere mortals. I remember just 4-5 years ago, large companies would have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have their app listed on the Vodafone Live app store, and then have 50% taken as commission for the privilege.

And for content, many Telco's just didn't allow it...because they had their own content subscriptions they were trying to sell to their users..so forget 30%, you simply couldn't sell your content subscription.

Apple's app store, and a 30% cut is starting to look fair compared to the above.

I wasn't arguing that Apple won't do it, just that they would be even more crazy to try this for SaaS than for content subscriptions. It's one thing to charge 30% for when someone is selling an entire product through your platform.

It would be unprecedented if they tried to charge 30% merely for access from your iOS device to a SaaS app. I think there is a pretty big difference.

Lastly, carving 30% out from your list price is pretty common if you're the wholesaler, manufacturer or orignal producer. For most of those scenarios they'll often be able to afford much more than 30%. It's the middlemen and distributors that get really hosed...and unfortunately services that do provide value but licence their content from others are collateral damage.

I'm starting to see a whole bunch of posts/comments about people reacting to losing 30% of their SaaS software revenue but no one seems to be calling out the Apple contract specifically lists content as defined as magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video. So I don't see where the SaaS angst is coming from.

Apple can charge 30% for apps and content because the ENTIRE product is being delivered on iOS. They can't charge that cut for SaaS because only a subset of the product is being delivered.

Could Apple attempt to take a cut from SaaS products if a user signed up from within your app IN THE FUTURE...sure, but I doubt they'd be stupid enough to try for 30%. Should Apple be compensated in some way for hosting/downloading your mobile app for your SaaS backend...maybe, and I'd be prepared to pay some commission if it drove signups, it might just be a tad lower than 30% though.

It's simply due to the regional monopolies the telcos and cable cos have in the US. If you had open competition it might go something like what happened in the UK.

Bandwidth was pretty expensive in the UK back in the nineties, but then OFCOM (the regulator) forced British Telecom to be broken into two companies...one wholesale and one retail. BT retail has to buy from BT wholesale at the same price as everyone else, and even small ISP's could now offer ADSL, and were allowed to install their own equipment at the exchange.

Fast forward to today...I pay £10 p/month for 24/2. If you have a satellite package with Sky TV you can get 2Mbps for free, or 20Mbps for £5 p/m or so. BT is just launching a 40Mbps service for around £25 p/m. Normally in the UK we get stung on prices and everything else I can think of is 20-50% higher in cost than the US...so it's pretty amazing our broadband costs are more competitive than many other countries. There just happens to be very health competition in this category.

It's going to be pretty interesting watching this play out. But Apple and Android have an unfair advantage right now...apps, and lots of them. If you've got an iOS or Android phone and already own some apps the other guys are going to have to ship something amazing or dirt cheap to get your attention.

As great as the new HP stuff looks, I wouldn't like to be HP, RIM (or Nokia and their potential Meego tablet) right now...tough road ahead building app ecosystem momentum. Who cares if the tablet is slightly better when I can't get my favourite apps.

I find it greatly amusing the roles are reversed from back when Apple struggled on the desktop due to lack of apps while microsoft dominated. My how times change in 10 years. At least this time we might have more than one platform that dominated 90% which is good for everyone.

I don't agree. I can show you some form based screens where a non-technical user can create some content and publish it fair easier and quicker than using an in-context editing approach.

I raised the point in comments above, but there is a big different between creating a new page from scratch and using a simple form to create a templated page. WordPress (or any blogging tool) doesn't make you build your blog post as a page draggin modules onto it...they give you a special admin page where you just fill in the title and body text and click publish...what could be simpler?

In-context editing does work great for many use cases, but it doesn't work well for some. Think about when you need to create a slightly interactive web page...not just a simple static one. You'd like one section of the page to fade in/out when the user hovers over an image for instance...I haven't seen anyone pull off an in-context UI that makes that easy but I've seen some great form based UI's that make that 30 secs work for a non-technical user.

Check out the Carrington Build WordPress plugin (no affiliation) for a decent example of providing users with a very simple admin page builder drag and drop layout tool.

I do wholeheartedly agree that very few CMS tools have an awesome UI for business users...maybe you can change that.

I think we're mixing requirements here.

Use case 1: I need to create a new page and for many corporate sites, each new page is different than the next for the majority of the body copy...different layout, one has a map etc. I need to choose where this page goes in the site as well. An in-context approach is very well suited.

Use case 2: I just need to create a press release quickly, it always has the same template, always goes to the same part of the site and it's always the same process I go through. An in-context approach here isn't that good, you want a template approach where the user fills in some fields on a form, a title, body text, maybe image, checkbox for map yes/no etc. This isn't a page at all really, it is a piece of content that is created and using the Press Releas template, the page is created dynamically at the right point in the menu structure. They'll create the page in 30 secs and be done. There is very little point in choosing from a list of modules to insert when you're dealing with a fixed template.

So you're talking about the templated approach vs the page builder approach. Neither is better or worse, just suited to different use cases.

Apologies for the delay in reply, quite busy at the moment. A couple important points to address from your comment.

That site only has a few screenshots taken from the UI, so unfortunately not all of the functionality is adequately represented. The product does actually have this capability, but as other have pointed out in the comments, this feature is low down the list of requirements for media customers as wasn't used much by journalists..hard to believe I know, but true. To your point, this is the difference between what we called in-context editing vs a dedicated console.

It is interesting to note that Vignette has a general purpose CMS product and in that case, the in-context editing screens are almost the primary editing mechanism, definitely in the top 3 features for any general corporate users. We found in research this was due to most users on a corporate site are "occasional" users. Corporate sites don't change that much so users just need to edit a few things a week, maybe a few things a day on large sites. But for a Media site, they put out thousands of new content items a day and users log into the CMS at 9am and logout when they go home. In that case, they are dedicated users and they don't need as much hand-holding about what the page will look like, they know what the template looks like and generally the content is being syndicated in 25 different formats so it is kind of pointless to look at just one format. It is also possible to make a more efficient UI for a dedicated console. Think about it..you manage a CMS that has 50 sites in many languages and 100,000 pages or more and you need to edit a page 3-4 levels down in the nav...as an advanced user would you prefer to navigate through the site and wait for each page to load before getting to the page to edit...or do you do a quick search or filter (or navigate by ajax tree if you only know its site location) and then make a quick change? Quite amusingly one of the biggest requests we had from a really large media customer was to put in a search box so the could type in the id of the article (as in article 101995) so they could get straight to an article. I thought it was a bit of a crazy request at first but when you sit with media staff and the editor is shouting across the newsdesk floor to get the story out in 30 seconds, you understand that typing in a 6 digit number is faster than browsing 4 pages or even searching sometimes.

I don't quite agree with the view that the most important roles to separate are the technical and non-technical. It might just be my personal experience but I've never been asked to build a CMS UI for a technical person, technical people are normally the ones implementing templates and are generally capable of learning any UI quickly. Normally I've been asked to design the UI for non-technical users, and the real challenge is optimising for "occasional" users vs "dedicated" users. Generally the UI you would design for one is really different than the best UI for another...for the occasional non-technical user you really need to hand-hold with in-context editing and things like wizards. With dedicated non-technical users they want search or filter based screens and bulk editing. The real trick is to achieve a UI that looks and works simply, but if the user wants can slowly reveal more advanced functionality over time...because user get more competent the more they use the tool.

Regarding different UI for different users, it is certainly not modes which are generally used one at a time. The workspaces are more akin to presenting the best UI for the task you're about to accomplish...so one user role can span across multiple workspaces. One of the biggest things we discovered after observing users closely is that many people act as different roles depending on the context. So the same user goes from creator, to reviewer in one day, then switches to manager when he does the night shift sometimes. This is the real world, certainly for media companies at least. (i.e. Even the editor still contributes sometimes). So the different workspaces are not modes, but rather optimised for a particular common task like "working with media" or "reviewing".

I agree that you can't generalise from what is quite a niche audience, the media vertical. I do maintain though that the CMS platforms built for media companies have the most hard core UI's out there for any CMS because media customers have high end requirements and pressures no other CMS users have. So if you're interested in cutting edge UX for CMS tools my extremely round-about responses were meant to convey that you might not find it in general purpose CMS tools but in specific audience focussed systems, especially Media. I maintain that you'll be able to achieve the best UI by closely observing the needs and actions of a defined audience, and that approach will always beat the general purpose targeted UI. Just look at Wordpress, awesome UI for blogging but honestly just average as a CMS (good enough for many cases, but not amazing) when compared to lets say Expression Engine.

I don't know what you're requirements are, but if you have any opportunity to narrow your audience (or tasks covered) I would highly recommend it after I discovered just how much that can improve your UI.

(Disclosure, I worked on this product in a previous life) So this is an enterprise CMS example, but the UI did get some pretty decent feedback from customers.

Have a look at http://media.vignette.com and you can see some screenshots. This product was targeted towards media companies (Gaming companies, Online media/news sites, video producers etc) so it did allow us to focus on some specific needs. You can imagine that with the volume of content that news sites produce, their requirements can be a little more high-end that your average user as they can spend 6-8hrs a day in the tool.

After designing and implementing quite a few CMS platforms, I think it is pretty hard to come up with a UI that will be appropriate for all users as many of them come to the tool with very different tasks in mind. Think about the legal guy or manager who just needs to approve something, the creative team who needs to upload some assets, someone working on a page or content, a marketing person who just needs to put some promotions on the site. Even within a media company there are people with pretty distinct roles and tasks they own. Therefore in our last UI we built the notion of workspaces...there was: - a Review Workspace which had an optimal layout for reviewing and approving content - an Asset Workspace which was optimised around batch uploading media, resizing it, a filter based UI because the library of images/videos tended to get pretty large - a Marketing Workspace just for the marketing team who is normally responsible for creating new promotions, and then deciding where they go on the site. Not every site needs this, but for those that do it worked pretty well as the marketing team just saw this workspace when logging in and didn't have to learn or care about all the other areas of the CMS. - And of course don't forget the Content Workspace where you can create content and pages :-) - For smaller shops, the workspaces are all accessible to multiple users, it is just the notion of the right UI for the task as opposed to one UI for all roles and tasks.

Not suggestion these are universally appropriate or right for your customer base, but I think on close examination you'd find at least 3-4 profiles of users or common tasks that can be optimised. The result for optimising for the 80% common tasks in this system meant that certain complex tasks could be done in <5 clicks. While I personally rate WordPress very highly for UI, the users we were designing for used this products for many hours a day and they felt WP was too many clicks, especially for media handling.

I've probably droned on for too long already and so there is not enough time to list every UI tweak and feature we created, we spent 2 years on the UI, but here is one example. Dynamic UI Controls based on dataset size: A common problem with a number of CMS tools we found was that the UI designer made a guess about how much data would be in the system for a certain task, and then design a UI control that might work great for 10 items, but would be useless if there ended up being 10,000 of those items in the system. So we built some UI controls that would adapt to data volumes...say you had content type x and there were only 10 of the items in the system, you'd ideally want to present it with a set of radio buttons (assuming select one requirement)....more than 10 but <50, popup/overlay with all items listed alphabetically on a single page for quick selection, 10,000 and you're going to need some type of navigator or set of filter controls.

P.S. Don't confuse this with some other previous Vignette products which have a pretty poor UI, this CMS was specifically created with a new UI from the ground up for that reason.

Love the sentiment, but I'm not sure they're going about it in the right way. Of course any attention and funding is better than none, but instead of getting McKinsey to advise someone or open a few offices in East London I would much rather:

* UK GOV creates a stupidly attractive tax and investment climate so that VCs are practically falling over themselves to invest in UK companies. The EIS scheme and VCT schemes are ok, but they could make these 10x more attractive. * Create jaw-dropping incentives for startups who deliver on what the UK GOV want, basically exporting services or creating jobs. Those kinds of companies should be afforded amazing incentives such as little to no tax for x years, no crazy 12% benefits to pay employees and how about little to no paperwork. * Perhaps some type of matched-investment scheme, where UK GOV will match investment from private angels or VC's * I am extremely encouraged to see that the gov is thinking about opening up procurement to small businesses. I fear that this won't happen in a timely manner and will face extreme hurdles. It is virtually impossible to get on the supplier list of the gov now, and even if you as a small hosted startup managed to pull of such a feat the first thing the local IT bod would ask for is SAS70 Type II compliance because that is government mandated. It seems crazy to us, being a UK startup, that one of the least likely customers would be our own government. You'd think they should be mandated to buy from small British companies in the spirit of helping your own economy.

It is really difficult to create a climate of risk taking that is evident in the valley which is fairly critical to this whole endeavor, I don't know how one manages to do that. But I sincerely hope someone manages to find out.

There just isn't the same tolerance for risk here in the UK and so the only mechanism I can see to break this scenario is to offer out of order incentives.

At least the V4 loads way quicker than the previous site, I might actually use it more now.