How to beta test experimental community services?
Wed, 2008-05-28 16:30Niko Nyman writes about Disney's decision to close their "promotional" community site:
When you start to think of it, it
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interesting thoughts.
Assuming a small project that does not make viable a satellite company, I would guess it's down to risk of the project, the quantity and quality (as in how much it reflects the real market place) of your betatesters.
If your betatester base reflects the real consumer base, then I would leave the choice of your products to them, otherwise your "educated choice" might be better.
Regarding the decision of starting a new "service" I guess it depends on how big is the risk + expected users "figure". If it's too big, the only mitigating action I can quickly think of is a short rampup phase to correct any problem in time (where users are admitted in phases)...
just my two cents at a very late time of the day ;-)
I think that the first thing we have to define is how much your "experimental community" depends on the "large and established company" to exist. I see the growth and development of the whole beta community as a bottom-up process rather than a purely top-down, centrally controlled project. I guess that the only top-down criterion that drives the community is the common interest in experimenting. Of course, the community depends on the product they experiment with and on the "virtual ground" (this site) to develop, but I also think the major factor that makes it exist is the further interest of its members in technology development and its consecuences in everyday life. On the other hand, it's futile to think of permanence in these processes, when temporary dissaperances or even permanent ones are part of its global development, effectiveness and success.
For some reason I feel very differently inside when I read:
- share.ovi.com
- mosh.nokia.com
- sportstracker.nokia.com
As opposed to reading 'Disney'. I tried to pinpoint why that is and I think it
I've seen that communities usually fall in to 2 types when evolving
a) a site that can grow organically (Quick to adapt)
b) a site with forced changes. (Slow to adapt)
Both have benefits but they both tend to lack a way to warn users about changes until after they change, by which times users have started to complain and start to drift away.
A trap that some sites fall in to when letting them grow organically is that they tend to push things into a "short term gain" scenario where they change to mirror the "Fad of the Day" to keep users, instead of finding a "Fad of Tomorrow" on which to grow and bring in new users.
Same can be said for sites that do a forced change. They tend to plan far ahead and if they get it wrong the users get bored and drift away. Then you end up making quick changes to a well planed site that end up awkward to use and gives users a bad experience.
The Balance between developing a stable community that can grow with users experiences and changing the site to bring in new users is a tough balancing act and few get it right first time!"
But as long as the site makers have a way of telling users about the change beforehand, then most of the big issues that harm the user experience can be sidestepped or at least minimised.
You can also create communities for a certain period of time - like running an event, party or summer camp. Announce time limits - e.g. 3 weeks, 3 months etc. or if you are really experimenting and you don't know for how long do you need let people know that it is for limited time only and e.g. "we will inform everyone about closing with 2 weeks notice."
Worse would be letting people believe - this from here to eternity ... and then quit without a notice. But is known to happen in real life relationships as well ...
To clarify, Pablo, I wasn't talking about Beta Labs community, but initiatives like:
- share.ovi.com
- mosh.nokia.com
- sportstracker.nokia.com
- + other forthcoming community services
And yeah, community-forming is always a bottom-up movement. There is no way you can build a real community as a centrally planned top-down project.
I guess that's why it feels so wrong when a top-down authority kills a community (example: Disney in Niko's post), or changes the community's environment radically (example: Facebook user community revolts whenever Facebook changes something).
If there is some more-or-less standardized approach for online comunities, when a big company decides to close down its comunnity website, it can offload it to a third party, something like a facebook group :)
One should think about the idea, to start a company for hosting online communities, and pitch to the big guys... "we will host your community for just $... a month".