Klue Chrome Extension

The Company

Klue helps companies keep track of their competitors by leveraging internal knowledge and scouring the web for intel. It is an information hub where sales employees can find out more about their competitors. Their clients include Dell, Hootsuite and Absolute, who use it to help their sales teams win more deals.

Website

The Klue Chrome extension is used to save and collaborate on competitive information found around the web.

The Problem

Klue’s Chrome Extension was extremely slow to open on media sites like CNN and it covered a large portion of the page. Also, it has not been maintained for a year since launch, where it was built as a quick hack.

Klue Extension before the start of the project

The Solution

We worked closely with the Klue team from their office to come up with ideas on what we can fix things and how we can improve performance. The following are some of the techniques we used to improve performance:

• Animations for perceived performance at load time
• Network profiling
• Superfluous feature reduction
• Utilizing native browser UI components instead of content injection
• Preloading assets concurrently

This proved to be extremely fast and reliable with almost instantaneous open and no loading time. Sadly, because the extension offers being able to highlight segments of the web page as part of the discussion, we could not use this approach. It was back to the drawing board.

Klue Extension displayed in the browser instead of injected into the host page

After a few weeks of tweaking, we managed to make things twice faster than originally by removing a lot of unnecessary code and making fewer server calls.

We then worked with the team to come up with a more compact design for the klue extension. The team wanted to make it more modern, take less space on the page and cleaner with fewer controls.

Original Klue Extension covering a large portion of the CNN website

New Klue extension, taking less space with a clean minimal design. Additional functions have been moved to a menu to help de-clutter the UI

Additional functions hidden away in a menu

The Outcome

Klue’s users adopted the extension as part of their workflow and we received many happy customer comments who really enjoy using the new extension. It is no longer a chore to open and wait for the extension. It just works.