Last week, team Fleep attended Refresh 2015, an awesome conference of kicking ass on the web. In short, it was a full day of inspiration, demonstrations, discussion… with some sharp questions thrown into the mix. The crowd of 200+ people included developers, designers, marketers, and other tech mavericks. We definitely enjoyed hitting Fn+F5 with that crowd! Like a wordsmith from our team concluded:
“Refresh was… refreshing!” – Andres from Fleep
Here are our key takeaways from Refresh 2015…
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The team checking out the SC5 Style Guide Generator with Varya. // Photo cred: Katheriin Liibert
Style-guide-driven development is officially a thing. And it’s kind of epic.
Varya Stepanova’s super informative session on this topic introduced a tool called SC5 Style Guide Generator that helps do this. Our developer Mihkel loved this idea, and here’s how he summarized it: “The tool basically makes the web style guide the developer’s playground. It documents the styles and components, makes it easier to change the styles and gives an overview of the the impact of any changes you make on other components.” - Happy customers = happy promoters
Nilan Peiris’ talk on scaling TransferWise at supersonic speeds was music to the ears of our Growth team. Want to grow your company? Find out why your clients love your product and take it from there. As Johannes reflected: “Nilan’s talk emphasized how important it is to measure the Net Promoter Score and really REALLY listen to why your clients love your product. This will help you in developing your product, in building your marketing campaigns and in helping your happy customers be the evangelists.” - Despite being a pest, email is still an effective marketing channel.
We at Fleep are in the business of replacing email conversations. However, Julie Ng explained that email is this cockroach of a social network – it’s a pest, but when presented right, it can be used well for marketing purposes.
We also had our own little corner at Refresh 2015. // Photo cred: Silver Gutmann
Julie shared how people are more likely to read your email newsletters and buy whatever it is you’re selling if the email is responsive and pretty, not wall-of-text style or plain text. She also gave some great advice on how to make sure your well-designed HTML emails look shiny and beautiful in the different email platforms.
Our developer Jaak really listened intently during Julie’s talk and concluded that we need to work on our email notifications: “Creating a holistic E-mail user experience is probably a whole lot of work, but it sounds like it’s worth it.”
- Taking a feature from idea to deployment can be a rocky road. You can choose to make it a smoother ride.
Andres, our web developer, enjoyed Liana Lo’s session on how the Prezi team works to deliver new value to their users every week. Particularly, Andres was intrigued to find out about Zeplin: “It’s basically a collaboration app that helps ensure you have all the assets you need in place for implementation!” -
Valentin showcasing Fleep // Photo cred: Katheriin Liibert
You’re a developer? Never leave your laptop home when going to a conference.
At Refresh, we noticed our developers got a bit more restless with every session and every break. Why? They just could not wait to start writing code – and they had not brought their laptops. Lesson learned. Next time, they’ll bring their computers and code away during the breaks. - Yes, you can fit great actionable content into a 30-min presentation.
This is something that blew Katheriin from our Growth team away – having worked with tech conferences before, she was thoroughly impressed by the speakers’ ability to share a lot of inspiring and practical content in just half-hour blocks. “By the end of the day, my brain was so full of ideas and possibilities!” she said. - The Mash Machine makes for a good party.
Take some awesome people, give them some food and drinks, a DJ battle on the Mash Machine, and you have the recipe for a great conference after party. (By the way, our dev Jaak totally killed it at the DJ battle.)
Refreshed, our team is now going full speed at the Fleep offices. Just one question remains for the organizing team… Same time next year?
