The biggest problem with web development

Hi, Habr we are a team of TrackDuck , a service that allows you to visually comment on "live" websites and images. The idea of ​​the product came into being 9 months ago. The three of us met at the Garage48 hackathon in Minsk and brought us together a common problem - the lack of high-quality communication with clients and customers in web development. It would seem that everything was simple, he made the project, put it on the dev server or sent the design to the customer, the customer looked, sent back comments to the developer, who corrected them and received money for his work. But everyone knows - everything in life is more complicated and at times sadder.

Getting feedback is a huge headache:

In the most common case, the client, noticing an error on the site or in the design layout, should take a screenshot, open it in ms Paint, mark the wrong places, save, attach to e-mail, write a comment and send. Progressive guys use clip2net or similar services, which is also not bad but not perfect, you still need to write letters that can be lost or about which you can forget. It is necessary to somehow interact with the customer management system. The funniest process I've seen looked like this:
the customer printed the design or a screenshot of the page from the browser for approval, drew arrows and wrote comments, scanned and sent back.

We calculated that this process takes an enormous amount of time and equally irritates both parties. And if the design was not so bad, for a long time we used redpen or similar services, while commenting on live projects still had real problems. The problem exists even if it is an internal project and all those working on it are in the same room.
')

The solution we offer

But where there is a problem - there must be a solution! Why not make a service with the help of which a client or any member of the team can simply go to their website in their favorite browser, in one click mark the wrong place on the page and the problem will immediately get to the person who will fix it. The project team, while it will always see the status of existing problems in the form of points on the site. All technical details that led to the error and a screenshot of the page (done on the client side) will be available in a convenient control panel.

This is how we saw the perfect service, which we were lucky to bring to life by the way, this is how the TrackDuck team is now working on improving the site using its own product:

You can try the demo on any site .

The first prototype of the service appeared in 48 hours and helped us win the hackathon for the next 2 crazy days and qualify for the Finnish Accelerator Startup Sauna. After that, we won prizes in 12 of the 14 contests in which we participated, among them was Yandex.Start, twice we completely rewrote the product from scratch, made an uncountable number of pilots with studios from northern Europe, released an infinite number of revisions. But at the moment, we really appreciate your opinion about the product and the idea and we will be happy to receive your feedback and criticism (even in the harshest form!). Therefore, we invite you to test TrackDuck , by the way it is completely free for now.



Since this is the first article in our blog, we would like to thank everyone who helps us: Bel.Biz , Enterprise Lithuania, QuoteRoller , Garage48, Startup Sauna and friends from mag.io and habrahabr for the kindly provided opportunity . Thank you, dzyakuy, thank you, ačiū, and kiitos!