Unexplored Possibilities of Tagging

Team Bloozle made this presentation a the blogCamp (held along with the barCamp) yesterday ...

| View | Upload your own

A Short Tale of the Long Tail

Team Bloozle made this presentation at the barCampMumbai3 yesterday ...

| View | Upload your own

BETA TESTING

Beta Testing : The phase that has flummoxed many a great services. Nikhil had presented a Bloozle demo in the last BarCamp and had asked volunteer beta testers to directly register on the site and give feedback - it was an open beta that way. We got some feedback , however not all beta testers were our target audience. More so, so many people tested but almost everyone did it 'on the surface' - the responses were not detailed and hence not much use to us.

Considering this as an inevitable consequence of the exercise, Nikhil and Hemant were in favour of re-employing a similar method to gather beta testers for the vastly improved Bloozle at the third edition of BarCamp in Mumbai. However, I had my apprehensions. We deliberated on the issue and I directed them to Joel's article on beta testing. It was the tipping point in our discussion and then we decided to go ahead with a closed - invitation only beta.

I can't over emphasize the benefits of this technique, but the fall outs could also prove irksome. For example we may not have the critical user density to correctly weigh in the feedback or we may miss out on quite a few of our target users. None of this is a trivial issue. However, what we need at this moment is direct, brutal feedback from our correct target user base so that we can launch the bug free, feature rich version to the world at large in as small a time frame as possible. So we figured this is the way forward for us currently.

However, if you are I-need-to-try-out-every-new-web-application type of geek (like us) , do drop us a mail. You could very well be the maven (early adopter) we are looking for. Now, that I have referred to mavens, I may as well recommend Tipping Point to you! A quick, fun read.

Bloozle Team Marathon Meet

Date: 15 March 2008
Venue: National Centre for Student Entrepreneurship, NITIE, Mumbai
Agenda: Plan for reopening the beta and presenting at the barCamp

Well, it was an unusual groggy Saturday morning for most, waking up at an unearthly hour of 9.30 am!

The Cast

Nikhil and Hemant were the first ones to touch base, followed by myself, Aniruddha and my namesake. Aurko starred in a critically acclaimed cameo (after a long time) and we were also joined by Pankaj later (and Ashish for a fleeting moment). Manpreet & Saurabh were missed. We were also about to have some female company, but for Hemant scaring her wits away leaving the poor thing scampering for cover.

The Minutes

Our discussion track followed the one jotted(painstakingly) by Nikhil on the Wiki.

1. What is to be discussed at Blog Camp and BarCamp?
2. How to announce the reopening of the beta?
3. Relook at features
4. Find out bugs in the site
   
5. Develop a framework for the tutorial
   

Eureka!!
During the course of this discussion, we stumbled upon a truly innovative practice and (what we'd like to believe) which was implemented for the first time ever since mankind walked on the planet. We call it "physical editing of virtual content". Here's a demonstration:

1. Our invention - display a webpage on the whiteboard and make edits on the board!



2. Caught in the Act

While this "physical editing of virtual content" remained a preferred method to discuss most items on the agenda, Nikhil had a unique way of prioritizing features. He first ran through all the features noted in the shared spreadsheet (yeah, as if you didn't know) and then turned off the spanking new projector. We were asked to recall the ones which we felt important and these were ranked on priority basis. Collectively, we noted down all the critical ones in decreasing order of priority ... here are some of the items we jotted down:

1. IE compatibility ( Tests + Rectification)
2. Bloozle button ( To be used to add any post/blog to Bloozle database without logging into site)
3. Chat with Team Bloozle
4. UI/UX Issues
5. Rating/ Tagging widget
6. Filter for sorting feeds
7. Add tag button

Gotta acknowledge the intrepid duo of Manpreet & Aniruddha for taking on these task.

Lunch Break :)

All the home delivery outlets of Powai ahd schemed up against us today. None was ready to deliver to NITIE , Domino's Pizza Hut, Subways , Smokin Joe's included. This led Nikhil to pop the question of NITIE delivery as soon as some poor chap picked up the line on the other side.

Finally, Garcia's was our knight in shining armour, delivering pizzas and lemonades to us starved souls. I think the grub appeased Mucchal's tummy the most as he dozed off into the sleepy realms. Aniruddha kicked him intentionally/unintentionally?) back into reality.

Back to work?
Hemant and Aniruddha left after lunch - Hemant had some work at home and Aniruddha was keen to get back to his vi to punch in more code. The rest of us also took a break and went to roam around the NITIE campus and took a turn towards the Vihar Lake where we spent some time dipping our feet in water. Check out the outline of the hills in the background!





Then we took a longish stroll to the NITIE hostel canteens to have some tea ...

Indeed back to work ...
Finally, tummies filled and minds refreshed we returned to our dark room and projector to discuss the intro and the format of the tutorial. It was a quick and fiery session with everyone throwing in ideas and we changing our formats twice before we completed the discussion.

By the time we ended it was almost 8.30 PM and we all remembered commitments made to friends for Saturday night parties. So we hurried back ....

Feature Prioritizing

Prioritzing the features in the first version/launch is one of the major hurdles that any application/ service website would face. The common wisdom for web based services is to let out the first version with the bare minimum features that would keep a user hooked on and then add subsequent functionality/features around this "core" with the user feedback. Of course , this is assuming that you are able to gain atleast a small, but dedicated user base or fan following, whichever you prefer. Rephrasing Paul Graham from this post, "..your early adopters are fairly tolerant. Your product just has to do something, not everything.."

This approach is the surest (not the easiest) way to dodge the black hole of “feature creep” wherein the developers/creators spend lot of time integrating new “killer features” into the product without having the actual user’s perspective. The end result is that the consumer ends up with a heavily loaded (read complicated) product without having any inkling of what to do with it. Hence, at every stage of development, it is essential to step back and think from the consumer’s point of view. Better still, have actual users testing it all along.

Now focusing on our site, we had already spent quite some time dilly-dallying over our ideal offering and the benefits (I’d call it increased productivity) that our users could potentially gain. In view of the ever increasing competing services springing up, we pulled out all the stops and decided to fix a date and launch with as much as we could accomplish in the time frame. (It’s another story that even this date got postponed, well twice actually).

Agreed that this was not the ideal way of getting about with the launch, but we needed something concrete to go by. Then we sat down and ranked the features that we planned to have on two major parameters :

• Perceived utility to the users
• Effort required from our side in terms of time and manpower

There could have been n other parameters, but for an optimal result, these two or their variants would more than suffice. Once, this was done, it was not very difficult to handpick the features that would form the “core” of our initial offering based on the "points" the features scored on these parameters. The subsequent releases would build upon this and as time and manpower permit, we would be crunching out newer and better features.

This “feature prioritization” problem would be faced by all product/site developers. Joel Spolsky has an excellent post here dealing with exactly the same issue. Additionally, 37 Signals and Newyorker have helpful articles here and here respectively.