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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