Yahoo invited press today to a product event in New York saying only that it will “share something special” soon after reports that the company is going to buy blog platform Tumblr.

It seems Yahoo has been very product-focused in the months since Marissa Mayer both took the chief executive corner office and demanded that critical employees not work from home. It has done a lot on the mobile front, releasing apps for the weather as well as Yahoo mail, which VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell called gorgeous.

The company also recently integrated Summly, a content summarizing technology, to its mobile homepage, providing a summary of a story to help people decide if they want to read it.

In the past month Yahoo has also acquired a number a companies including GoPollGo and Milewise, a polling app and frequent flyer app respectively.

Yesterday, rumors broke out about what would be the biggest acquisition for Yahoo next — a $1 billion deal to buy Tumblr. We may hear more about this deal at the event, which is set for 5 p.m. Eastern on Monday.

Photo credit: earcos via photopin cc

It’s almost midnight, and you’re stuck on a math problem that is due first thing in the morning.

In stressful situations like these, online tutoring startup Instaedu can help. The Silicon Valley company specializes in finding stumped students a tutor or homework assistants at any time of day or night.

When the company launched, its core innovation was the pay-by-the-minute model, and the on-demand access to tutors. But with its new features, the startup is moving into the realm of personalized learning.

The Instaedu team is honing its abilities to better match its students with tutors based on their academic needs and interests, so they’ll be tempted to set up regular sessions.

Currently, there are 1,500 tutors signed up from top colleges like Harvard and MIT, but the founders aren’t disclosing the number of registered students. Tutors are paid a fixed rate of $20 an hour (Instaedu keeps the rest), and working hours are flexible.

The tutors connect with students using video chat, text chat and document editing — it’s all online, so there are no travel costs. Alternatives include Edoboard, which provides tutors with online tools, and TutorCentral.net.

“The goal is for our students to get to know tutors better before even having that first lesson,” said Alison Johnston, Instaedu’s 25-year-old cofounder (pictured above). So the new features also make it a bit easier to schedule a regular time to meet with the best possible tutor. They include:

• Real-time messaging so a student can chat with a tutor before scheduling a lesson (this makes it easy to connect with a tutor who is currently online);
• “Smart messages” for students who need to be matched with a tutor that can help with an advanced or niche subject;
• Tutor reviews which are displayed publicly so students can browse tutor profiles.

Instaedu has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the SocialxCapital Partnership.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yammer confirmed today that it is laying off some of its marketing and sales staff, seven months after the company was acquired by Microsoft.

Yammer provides a software as a service product that businesses use to collaborate inside their own social network. The collaboration tool was snapped up by Microsoft in July, though the parent company has kept the technology to continue running instead of shutting it down and absorbing Yammer’s employees.

“We can confirm that Yammer eliminated a small number of sales and marketing positions. Each of our businesses continually assesses and reallocates resources to align with their priorities,” said a spokesperson in a statement emailed to VentureBeat. “Yammer has continued to grow rapidly since becoming part of the Microsoft Office Division.”

The company, which recently opened a new office to house its employees, is likely just trimming off the extra fat after its acquisition. Microsoft already has large sales force, and it can likely handle adding Yammer to its stable of products to push. And Microsoft certainly can support any new marketing efforts.

It also sounds like the company is continuing to hire in its other departments, which means we’re likely not seeing a decline in the value of the product.

hat tip TechCrunch; Yammer image via Robert Scoble/Flickr

A good software company doesn’t stay still for long. Products are constantly in motion, from minor updates to major revamps. Technologies advance.

However, just because you release a quicker, sleeker, better version of your application, don’t expect that your user base will automatically love the new design.

The fact is, people get used to doing things a certain way, and getting comfortable with any change takes time.

From a software development standpoint, this means that successfully launching a major design improvement or UX change involves more than just writing good code. You have to also manage the transition for your existing user base.

At Zendesk, we recently changed our whole application from an HTML browser-based application to a single-page JavaScript application. This shift enabled us to create an extensible platform with a real-time experience that’s more streamlined and agile.

Yet even with these improvements, we still needed to help transition our end users for a significant change in the user experience.

Here are four tips we learned to help other developers ease their end users through a similar UX transition.

1. Bring your customers into the process from the beginning

When customers use an application on a daily basis — in some cases, eight or more hours per day with some enterprise apps — they form a close connection. These types of users don’t like to be caught off guard by surprise changes.

If you have an active and vested user base, let your customers know your plans as early as possible, including the underlying motivations driving the change. Do what you can to make your users feel they are an important part of the process. In some cases, this may be soliciting feedback and input from the user community before you begin the project.

2. Have a long beta period

Instead of just rolling out your new UX version all at once, it’s wise to have an initial soft launch to a smaller group of users, followed by a long beta period. Soft launches allow you to manage the transition with a “friendly” set of users who are open to the changes, while a long beta period will let you to see how users responds to your new design, workflow, features, etc.

We started with a soft launch to a small subset of Zendesk customers. This was followed by a four-month beta period, which allowed us to see how customers responded to the new design and workflow.

The other key benefit of a long beta period is it keeps the design team close to end users and their needs; this can be particularly important to keeping designers grounded and focused on real end user needs during long development projects.

3. Provide a transition period
Once you’re ready to release your new version, the official launch should also be carried out in stages. You’ll have a smoother transition if you don’t force everyone to switch at once.

After the launch of the new Zendesk, we immediately provided the new version for all new accounts and trials. However, we let all existing customers stay with the original version for an extended period, enabling them to transition at their own pace. Added flexibility lets customers switch back and forth between the former and new version, until they decide to transition for good.

Don’t worry about have to maintain two separate software versions. Going forward, you can make new features and enhancements available only on the newer version. That will provide extra incentive for even the most diehard legacy users to transition to the latest and greatest.

4. “Sell” your existing customers on the changes

Your company’s marketing material and sales team might be focused on pitching new customers, but don’t forget to talk to your existing customer base.

Whenever you’re rolling out a big UX change, it’s critical that your existing users fully understand what they’re getting. After all, you didn’t invest in this major development project just for the sake of change. Therefore, make sure all your users understand why you did it, and most importantly, how it will make their lives better or job easier.

Final thoughts

Don’t be discouraged if some users are resistant to change. That’s a sign you have passionate users who are fully invested in your product. However, by following these steps, you can ease your customers’ shift away from the status quo and help them reap the benefits of your hard work.

This post was written by Alexander Aghassipour, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Zendesk.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product.

I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.

Now, it’s not that the apps sucks. In each case, the apps ranged from good to great. They had huge amount of functionality, did unique things that other apps didn’t do, and solved a clear set of problems in a compelling way. They were fast, pretty, used nice fonts, and had good screen layouts.

But each had a jumble of different ways of doing things. As you went from one set of activities to another, the approach quickly became inconsistent. I kept noticing that when I was doing a different set of things in the app, the user flow would change. Or when I switched modalities, I would have different ways to do things that were dependent on where in the app I was.

Sometimes I’d click on a label to take an action; other times I’d click on a text description of the action. In some places I cared a lot about the Tab key; in others it was the Enter key. In some screens data was automatically saved after I exited a field; in others I had to take an explicit action. In some situations all the actions I could take were exposed; in others I had to search a menu tree for them. Orientation of the iPhone mattered in some cases and didn’t in others. Sometimes the key set of data that I was working on was the focus on the screen; in others it was only part of the screen.

When I start feeling uncomfortable with UX, I start counting extra key and mouse actions. When I think I should be able to do something with one action and it takes three or more, there’s a problem. When I realize in one part of the app that I can do something with one action, but in the other it takes four, there’s a problem.

In each of the companies, there was an excellent VP of engineering. Each one had a strong design/UI person. Two of the three had founder/CTOs. And the CEOs in each are excellent. They are each obsessed about the product, but they are approaching it from an engineering perspective. What are the features the user needs? What is the feedback we are getting about what individuals want to do? Each of these things ends up being a story or a task — a feature — but there is no unifying UX philosophy.

In each case, when asked, no one in the company owned the UX. In one case, no one felt qualified. In one case, no one really knew what I meant and kept conflating UX with UI. And in one case it was a revelation that users were struggling with a chaotic and inconsistent UX.

I’m noticing this more and more in the different apps I use, especially early-stage applications. Some are crafted beautifully from a UI perspective, but once I start using them on a daily basis, I want to scream. Others have acceptable UIs and a layer of UX consistency that breaks down immediately when I become an advanced user. And others are radically different UX experiences across devices.

I’ve come to appreciate the importance of a single person in the company owning the UX with this person being the arbiter of discussion around how to implement the UX. There’s nothing wrong with lots of different perspectives, but a single mind has to own it, synthesize it, and dictate the philosophy. But first, they have to understand the difference between UI and UX, and — more importantly — the product-oriented execs who approach things from an engineering perspective need to understand this.

I’ve decided it times to up our game significantly on this. I’m curious about what resources you rely on, thing are amazing, and would give to an executive team that is struggling with this.

Brad Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group; this post originall appeared on his blog. Feld lives in Boulder, Colo. and invests in software and Internet companies around the United States. In his spare time, he runs marathons and reads a lot.

Image credit: Juriah Mosin/Shuterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Many times during product development, we face questions — “What’s the next feature that will be most valuable to our customers?” or “What feature do our customers want and don’t have?”

These questions are hard to answer and are most often dealt with by good analytics that you extract from the product itself, from customers, or by running gut-feeling A/B tests.

We take the lean startup concept very seriously and believe that you must have a good MVP (minimal viable product) that works — that is, accomplishes your goal, whether it’s conversion from free to paid or any other goal. Only then can you start adding other features requested by customers or those you think will add more value to the product.

But how will you know if those added features are worth the development time and other resources? Dummy features is one tool you can use to determine whether it is worth it to focus on and develop more features.

What’s a dummy feature? Basically, if you can’t decide what’s next, you do front-end implementations, add them to your service, and grab figures on how many customers tried to use them — in other words, slap up a fake button and see how many people push it.

Dummy features are great when you need to release your product as soon as possible.

A great example is in payment processing; it usually takes a lot of time to integrate a billing system and take payments from customers. So the first time we needed to take payments from customers, we just emulated all the billing forms and didn’t save any information or charge the users — yes, you heard correctly! We didn’t charge the users. Because at the first release of a product, what you really care about is (1) does it work? (2) do customers like it? and (3) what are the conversions? It’s well worth it to release the product faster and add the billing system later.

Another example is a dilemma we had about whether we should add an SMS notifications feature in which every time a new security vulnerability was found on a customer’s website, she’d get an SMS notification. Before we even implemented that feature, we inserted a check box with an SMS notification label and tallied how many customers checked it and wanted that feature (of course, we showed them a nice message box saying that feature would soon be available). Surprisingly, more than 60 percent wanted SMS notifications, so we implemented that feature. Now everyone is happy.

Bottom line: If you can’t decide whether or not a new feature should be added, just create the user interface, add the feature to the service, grab the analytics on how many users tried to use it, and you’ll make a more fact-based decision on what the next feature should be. In addition, dummy features can be used to shorten development times and bring the product out faster.

Yaron Tal has been working on turning ideas into marketable products for more 12 years. Currently, Tal is CTO of security company 6scan and blogs at Startup Internals, where this post originally appeared.

Top image courtesy of igor1308, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Yahoo brought PayPal cofounder Max Levchin on its board today, but while it gains a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, it loses two other members: The Weather Channel’s David Kenny and Intuit’s Brad Smith.

Yahoo released a statement today announcing the new addition. Other than cofounding PayPal, eBay’s payments arm, Levchin also ran a social company called Slide that Google later acquired and shuttered. Levchin is otherwise on the board of Yelp and is a director for note-taking service Evernote.

Marissa Mayer, the current chief executive of Yahoo, explained, “Max is someone I’ve admired throughout my career for his phenomenal sense for great productions and keen focus on user experiences.”

This reinforces the idea of Mayer as a product-focused CEO, concentrating Yahoo on what it can build for its customers.

As Levchin enters, however, two other Yahoo board members are stepping down, bringing the total to 11 Yahoo board members. Mayer stated that that both of them had “critical roles in bringing me to Yahoo” and that they both were instrumental in the recent buyback agreement made with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Kenny joined Yahoo’s board in February 2011 and Smith in 2010.

A spokesperson for Intuit said Smith, “decided not to stand for re-election so he could focus on his role leading Intuit along with his ongoing participation in industry groups and organizations like the CEO roundtable.”

Max Levchin photo via Joi/Flickr