Company: SmartBear
Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager)
Community: SmartBear Community
Lithy category: Community Design of the Year
As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.
In February 2015, we launched http://community.smartbear.com on the Lithium engine. By that time, we had forums for different products. They had their own design, gamification features, etc. It was a big challenge for us to unite all forums on one Lithium engine – we didn’t want to reduce the features we had on our old forums. In addition to this, we wanted to add more modern features provided by Lithium.
One of the main requirements was related to the community design – we wanted to see a branded community. Our designers worked hard on every image we added to the Community pages. In addition to modern design, we wanted to have more than just forums in the Community. Now, the SmartBear Community includes forums, feature request areas, Community Matters Blog, SmartBear Developer Network, Customer Advisory Board, different user groups and much more.
Here is the Community home page:
We regularly analyze community metrics, and they prove the success of our new Community. We achieved the 500% growth of visits to our Community by the end of 2015! We expect to see this trend in 2016 as we put much effort into the SmartBear Community.
|
Metrics |
YoY Growth,% |
|
CHI |
+18% |
|
New Topics |
+58% |
|
#Solutions |
+240% |
|
#Kudos |
+280% |
|
Visits |
+500% |