I am sure you are all familiar with the "launch now" strategy, touted by
the tech industry for over a decade now.
It goes by many names. Fail fast.
Permanent beta. These strategies are
based on the idea that you shouldn’t spend too much time researching your
design in advance. Instead, release your rough draft and use the market as your
testing environment. Ask your early
adopters what they think and make changes in Version 2.0 accordingly. The advantage is that you get on the market
before any potential competitors. If can
build up your subscriber base, you get some network externalities and switching costs that blocks others out. The downside
of course is that your original design might really suck.
My Take
But here is where I have a problem with this approach
(besides early products sucking). If you
do some careful and controlled research, you can develop generalizable
rules. Generalizable means that you know
in advance what attributes work with what kinds of products, what kinds of
customers, and what kinds of use cases.
In advance!! After a few rounds of
controlled testing, you don’t need to test a particular product very much in
advance to know how it will perform in the market. You can release a very good product the FIRST
TIME !! Yes, I know all caps is yelling
– I am yelling on purpose.
Of course, there will be nuances that are different for each
product that you won’t know for sure from the controlled testing design
principles. You are welcome to
launch first and test nuances in the market with the intention to fix them in
Version 2.0. That is where A/B testing
has its greatest strength. But there is
a big difference between using the market to test your fundamentals and using
the market to test some nuances.
Another benefit is that design principles will show you some
global maximums in design whereas field testing locks you into the basic
architecture and you wind up only finding local maximums. If you know anything about optimization you
will understand how important this can be.
It can make your design an order of magnitude better.
Many of my students come from companies that have the launch
early and fail fast mindset. They don’t
want to learn research methods and they prefer recipe style design
guidelines. Bake at 400 degrees for 15
minutes and out pops a decent meal. If
your guests say it needs salt, hand them a salt shaker. But to me, that just isn’t good enough. I want my user to rush out dying to tell all
of her friends how great her experience was.
How unique and unexpectedly satisfying from start to finish. The
proverbial “customer delight.”
Your Turn
Which do you prefer? As
a designer, would you like to have some generalizable design principles that
you can turn to for each new design? Or
do you want to start with a blank slate and use the market to test each idea?
As a user, do you want a half-baked product now and upgrade
when the time comes? Or do you want companies
to do their homework in advance?
