What's the plan?


I’m just wondering in general what’s in the pipeline for Unbounce users, what are concrete plans for taking Unbounce to the next level?

I’ve been using Unbounce quite a lot over the past few months, now running close to 100 landing pages in different campaigns and instead of starting to like Unbounce more, I’m actually finding more and more small stuff that irritates me and actually makes me look for a more user friendly and advanced alternative, maybe even back to WordPress with some landing pages templates and GWO.

Apart from some cosmetic changes, and sure, and undo button that should have been there from the start I haven’t seen any major upgrade of user functionality and general usability, from a startup SAAS provider I would expect more to be honest.


14 replies

Hi Polle,

First of all, please accept our apologies for the annoyances you are finding.

Our priorities for features and improvements are largely driven by what we perceive to be our customers needs so any direct feedback is greatly appreciated.

What things would you like to see?

Are there specific areas you find deficient or problematic?

Here are a number of things we are working on at the moment that should be released in the near future:

Editor:

  • a fairly major UI overhaul for the editor which includes the ability to drag & drop elements onto the page as well as the ability to drag them between page sections and boxes after they have been placed on the page. We have also made a number of other improvements and bug fixes.

  • improving asset management in the editor so that it is easier to work with uploaded images and files for downloads.

  • using css3 to style buttons and other elements to reduce the dependency on images in our templates.

Outside the Editor:

  • better management of pages, including the ability to group pages together

  • support for multiple users to access the same account, and for one account to accommodate multiple companies or “clients” for agencies.

  • field mapping for your integrations to open the doors for sending arbitrary form fields to your 3rd party services (mailchimp, constant contact, aweber…)

  • integration with wufoo to count conversions when using their forms

  • app and published page performance improvements (coming soon)

  • better bot filtering and other analytic and conversion tracking improvements

  • improved version of MailChimp integration is in the works as well as a Wufoo integrations

and many other improvments are in the works as well…

hope this helps

Justin

Sorry for the very late reply on this, appreciate you taking the time to go about this in so much detail. I was a bit frustrated at the moment I suppose…

Please continue to improve especially from the perspective of more advanced users, with dozens of pages Unbounce gets very tedious in every aspect.

I’m glad I found this update, I’ve only been using Unbounce for around a month, but to continue being a user, I really did need answers to some of the questions Polle highlighted, it’s great to see a clear pipeline of things soon to come on unbounce, it’s renewed my interest in the system.

The big updates from this list I’d most like to see are the multi-user support and not listed but the ability to customise what the lead notification emails look like.

Thanks for keeping us updated on the progress, much appreicated.

Oliver, check out http://getpremise.com for a WordPress based landing page platform with A/B testing and stock image library implemented.

Planning on making the move soon myself.

Hi Polle,

Thanks for suggesting the wordpress option, it’s something we previously used before unbounce. However, we have quite a few issues when it comes to using plugins as we’re running the MU version of wordpress.

I’ve only been using unbounce for a short time, and so far, it may be lacking some of the features i’m looking for but because of the support and personal approach (knowing the names and positions of various unbounce staff) and great looking easy to use system, I won’t be leaving unbounce any time soon.

It sounds like you’ve already made your mind up on going to wordpress, but it might be worth just holding on a bit longer for some the these updates to roll out maybe they might convince you to stick with it.

Agree, support and personable approach is great!

I already expressed my issues indeed, in short Unbounce is good for a few pages in English, not so great for dozens of pages in multiple languages with more advanced forms.

Will probably continue to use Unbounce for quickly deployable pages with custom designs but going to switch soon indeed.

Would be great to finally see some of those promised features implemented.

Feels to me core development has stopped, are you guys just growing the low-level user base and aiming to be taken over by a third party or something?

Hi Polle, thanks for keeping the pressure up!

Core development is still very much ongoing, and I can tell you there are no plans for Unbounce to be taken over by a third party! Quite the contrary. We also have some things in the works that should help accelerate development (we’ll share specifics with customers just as soon as we can!).

Our user base is growing very quickly, and as such we’ve been working very hard on an infrastructure project to ensure we continue to scale smoothly. One of the things we’re working on right now is deploying to multiple data centers. You may have heard about Amazon’s recent outages that impacted a number of online services. We’re working hard to ensure that doesn’t happen to Unbounce. It’s one thing if you can’t check into a location on Foursquare. It’s another thing entirely if you’re running PPC campaigns pointed at our pages. That work has taken a little longer than expected, but we did just start deploying all of this in stages earlier this week.

As Justin points out above, we do have a number of planned improvements. The drag-and-drop editor UI improvements are just pending some user testing at this point, so those will be out soon as well…

On of the reasons I like Unbounce are replies like yours Carl: very responsive, friendly and positive, instead of ignoring the PITA user I am! Seriously, good stuff.

I just can’t wait to see all those great handy features come online as I’m a fan of Unbounce but getting tired of working with it at the same time.

Eg. Just had to change email notifications on 30 pages, going through them individually because an inside sales collegue is on holidays, such tedious stuff just doesn’t make me a happy user. Surely this can be done more efficiently.

Anohter example, the Wufoo forms: Great stuff, planning on using them here http://www.getflir.com/green-guideboo… , “integrates” nicely, but what’s the added value of Unbounce if you loose all conversion/test data functions?

We’re using Pardot in the States, have a look at how their organise forms and form fields, would be great to have that stuff in Unbounce.

Anyway keep up the and will do my best to keep you guys awake!

On of the reasons I like Unbounce are replies like yours Carl: very responsive, friendly and positive, instead of ignoring the PITA user I am! Seriously, good stuff.

I just can’t wait to see all those great handy features come online as I’m a fan of Unbounce but getting tired of working with it at the same time.

Eg. Just had to change email notifications on 30 pages, going through them individually because an inside sales collegue is on holidays, such tedious stuff just doesn’t make me a happy user. Surely this can be done more efficiently.

Anohter example, the Wufoo forms: Great stuff, planning on using them here http://www.getflir.com/green-guideboo… , “integrates” nicely, but what’s the added value of Unbounce if you loose all conversion/test data functions?

We’re using Pardot in the States, have a look at how their organise forms and form fields, would be great to have that stuff in Unbounce.

Anyway keep up the good work behind the scenes and will do my best to keep you guys awake!

Again, the first post was 2 months ago, the answer with pipeline was two months ago and I haven’t seen any changes since then.

Just a small kick of this topic, still waiting for some kind of product update as promised…

Any news?

Hey Polle (and others),

Our biggest priority right now for us (and for you), is to ensure that we continue to scale gracefully as our overall usage increases. We don’t feel we have the luxury of offering up a Twitter-esque fail-whale on your published pages. While this kind of work doesn’t bring shiny new features, it’s critical to our mutual, continued happiness. We’re in a bit of a tight spot in that this scalability work is currently holding up some other releases, and has taken *way* longer than originally anticipated.

On that note, Saturday night we put our new (scalable) page server architecture into production for a test run, and it went really quite well. If it had gone *perfectly*, we would have put our beta editor improvements into production this week. However, we did notice a couple serious enough issues during the test run that we’re going to get those fixed first, which we anticipate taking another few days.

On the product development side, our new field mapping functionality that will let you map custom form fields in your integrations is nearing completion and looking good, and a basic version of our page grouping feature has been demonstrated internally. Plus, in addition to the existing editor improvements that are queued up, we’re working on adding additional formatting/styling options that will significantly reduce the need to resort to creating graphics for backgrounds, buttons and such.

I should add that it’s not uncommon at all for companies like ours to hit plateaus in their product development cycles. Not only are we producers of SaaS software, and tied into a whole community of other producers, we’re also consumers of SaaS software (every single critical bit of our business is in the cloud), so we’re very aware of how we stack up against everyone else out there.

Sorry we’re not releasing as fast as you’d like right at this moment, but we’ll return to our usual responsiveness just as soon as we’ve gotten this annoying but necessary scalability work out of the way!

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