Another example of horrid User Experience leading to digruntled customers -
Apple (believe it or not), announce that iTunes via Wifi would be available
to all iPhone customers in select Starbucks. This was pretty cool and I got
amped to try it out. I went into a starbucks and there was a song from a cd
playing in the store that was decent - so I thought I would give it a shot.
I hit the iTunes button on my phone - low and behold - they had not worked
out the kinks related to the fact that Starbucks wifi is T-Mobile -- iPhone
uses At&t, and of course the only way to get a song would not be through
wifi but through the slow as molasses moving as glacial pace uphill in
January...
The launched it - I got excited - they advertised it in the store - and it
didn't work - and frankly that pissed me off.
On Jan 23, 2008 10:43 AM, Julie Palmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Another reason to soft launch, at least initially, it is to see how your
> systems perform, to gather feedback from users who discover the new
> feature (if you have a tool for that) and to give yourself an
> opportunity to roll back to the previous version of the product quietly
> if unexpected problems arise.
>
> I used to work in the airline industry, and my company completely
> believed in the benefits of soft launch...nothing every got announced
> until we knew it was in and performing well. We gave ourselves several
> days to discover problems before we made any announcement.
>
> Some of our competitors would do huge announcements prior to launch
> ("Come look at our great new <insert product here> on <insert date
> here>!") The benefit would be the customer interest it generated, but
> the risk was overloading a product that had not adequately been user
> tested or a system that had not been properly load tested. From our
> perspective, it was amusing (in a sick, sadistic sort of way) to see
> their entire site crash on the big day. Not only did they wind up with
> egg on their faces, but they lost revenue and inconvenienced customers
> when their self-service products were brought down with the rest of the
> site...a sad situation that could have easily been avoided by a
> soft-launch approach.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of W
> Evans
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 10:22 AM
> To: Mark Schraad
> Cc: IxDA
> Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] new features
>
> Mark -
> I would say that if it's a potentially disruptive new feature - then
> call it
> out in some way - if it's a catch up feature - let it soft-launch
> because as
> you intimate - it draws attention to the fact that you are a latecomer
> and
> playing catch-up...
> This actually just happened to me last night when I realzies that my
> emails
> in gmail are automagically getting labeld "Inbox" with a little (x) for
> me
> to remove or re-label the message. I thought it was cool - but so minor
> there was no reason to call it out, but when I discovered it - I thought
> to
> myself, "Self - this is pretty cool - because most people don't even use
> labels with gmail - so perhaps this might improve more users experience
> with
> the product.
>
> Not really insightful - just my thoughts.
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
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> ______________________________________________________________________
>
--
~ will
"Where you innovate, how you innovate,
and what you innovate are design problems"
-------------------------------------------------------
will evans
user experience architect
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-------------------------------------------------------
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