Janessa Olson - Kongregate Developers Blog

Kongregate News Jan 14, 2020
Kongregate Takes Your Data Privacy Seriously!

You may have received a flurry of emails from various companies relaying that they had updated their privacy policies. These changes stem from the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect January 1, 2020. But for us at Kongregate, our "privacy for all" mindset did not start in 2020 because of CCPA; we overhauled our privacy policy back in 2018, when CCPA’s “father,” GDPR, went into effect. Instead of just throwing all these abbreviations at you, let us further explain what all this means. What is the GDPR? The General Data Protection Regulation -- or “GDPR” -- is a set of European regulations introduced by the European Union to protect online information and privacy by granting citizens and residents of the EU more control over their personal data. These regulations went into effect May 25th, 2018. Okay...what exactly does that mean? In the most normal human speak I can manage, the GDPR was created with the end goal that companies be more responsible with user data. In this particular context, the word “responsible” includes (but

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Game Development Jun 25, 2019
MVP Like Nintendo in 1980

If you work in or around some kind of software development, you’ve probably heard “MVP” sputtered in passing conversation, or seen it scribbled in a comment of a Google Doc. “MVP” is an acronym for “Minimum Viable Product.” The definition of an MVP is a loaded one, and changes slightly from Product Person™ to Product Person™. One popular definition is, “What can we build that will give us the most validation?” The school of thought I personally subscribe to (and will be using for the duration of this article) describes an MVP as “the smallest solution you build that will bring the most value to your customers.” At first, all of this probably sounds straightforward enough, but there’s deceivingly a lot to unpack here; in my experience it’s never just “what’s the smallest solution.” In one of my favorite articles about MVPs, they say, “Starting with a solution is like building a key without a door” (9). It’s easy to fall into a cycle of Build/Measure/Learn (as the first definition I mentioned often

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Marketing Feb 12, 2019
A Beginner's Guide to User Testing

A few years ago, I was baffled by the performance of an email my team was sending to our users. At a glance, the unique open and click-through rates were fantastic by our industry standards, but when the users landed in our app, the bounce rate was uncomfortably high. Paradoxical, indeed. When we looked at the feature activity data, it seemed that users were either bailing seconds after arriving or clicking aimlessly before eventually leaving, missing the feature we told them about entirely. It was almost as if they had no idea what to do once they got there. Determined to understand why the email was clearly failing at what we wanted it to do (and under a somewhat intimidating time constraint of the upcoming sprint), I printed it out and took it to the food carts down the street. I had every food cart owner read the email, and in their own words, tell me what the email said. Each and every conversation went something like this: Me: “Hi, can you please read this example email?” Food Cart Owner:

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