Crowdsourcing Snagit on Mac Research Development
In the search for ideas and feedback for their latest product variation, TechSmith, a popular software company launched a crowdsourcing campaign on the community site Get Satisfaction. The company’s leading screen capture software platform, Snagit which has been available for PC users only, needed extensive consultation before expanding its availability for Mac users.
More than 48,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to deliver a more social maintenance experience, improve customer loyalty, build better products and increase SEO. It is an online community-building platform that allows anyone to crowdsource a global community of registered users for ideas. Their recent venture with Snagit for Mac, including details of their crowdsourcing effort and the return on TechSmith’s investment, has been documented in a case study on their website.
The campaign for Snagit on Mac was launched by TechSmith in December 2009, in beta form, along with the Get Satisfaction community site. To capture a size-able amount of information on the features and feel that its users and targeted customer base wanted from Snagit on Mac, TechSmith felt that crowdsourcing could meet their needs.
A priority set by the developers was to use the voting functionality of the Get Satisfaction site to regulate which features were most important to users, and to use the discussion forums to seek reviews on the overall design and feel of Snagit on Mac. The venture was a success attracting ideas and feedback from over 450,000 participants making a saving of $500,000 in research costs. On November 9, 2010, Snagit on Mac 1.0 was released.
We were able to collect so much valuable information through crowdsourcing. It benefited everyone involved in the development process, and most importantly, our customers. Our users were able to help design the product that they wanted, and could ask questions, report problems, make suggestions and share what they loved about the product. Meanwhile, TechSmith saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on the research phase of this project.
Tiffany Wood, Snagit product manager at TechSmith
Get Satisfaction has proven to be a vital crowdsourcing asset for TechSmith having been implemented for their entire collection of visual communication software, including Screencast.com, Camtasia for Mac, Camtasia Relay,Camtasia Studio, Jing, Morae, Snagit (Windows and Mac).