Don’t fall into the permanent beta trap

The rise of social media and web 2.0 has encouraged a worrying trend – the philosophy of permanent beta. This recognises that an application or website can never be perfect and continue to evolve long after that initial release. The feedback channels that have become so important in social media provide a never-ending source of user reviews and comments, which any conscientious development team will study before working on a new, improved release.

You might think this would prove a healthy approach – any solution that takes into account the needs of its end users is more likely to be successful than one that does not. But the downside is that permanent beta can invite a ‘suck it and see’ approach by which the release version is acknowledged to be imperfect in the hope that free feedback gained from users will help to quickly produce a much improved follow-up version.

Tapping the same end user willingness to test the waters of free software, the most successful social media campaigns have inspired brand loyalty by providing free online content that is genuinely useful or just plain fun. Engaged users then join social media channels built in to these applications or microsites to virally spread the word. So the recipe for success is straightforward and easy to emulate. Or is it?

A brief visit to the iTunes App Store suggests that this isn’t the case. The store is littered with sponsored free applications that marketers were clearly hoping would be the next Kraft iFood Assistant or Carling iPint, both of which launched to much acclaim and were downloaded and used by many thousands of consumers. However, the truth is that far more applications fail to inspire us. App analytics firm Pinch Media claims only about 20 percent of users return to use free apps the first day after they download it, and that after 30 days fewer than 5 percent are using the app. Paid apps show a slightly steeper fall-off rate, so there is only a brief window to capture imagination, potential revenues and the viral marketing buzz necessary to inspire high download volumes. It’s very hard to shake off the negative reviews that a flawed first release is bound to provoke, no matter how much better you make the follow-up version.

So what is it that consigns so many apps, often the fruits of years of development work, to the dustbin? It seems that many of them do indeed fall into the trap of permanent beta – of hastily taking an idea through to development and launch without due consideration of the target users, expecting the fine-tuning to be done at some later date. Yes, you can get lucky, but far more often this approach will result in an application or site that is totally irrelevant to its target audience and therefore never takes off.

To increase your application or campaign microsite’s chances of success it’s critical to involve real users in the development process prior to initial launch. Organise focus groups to get feedback on and develop the proposition. Conduct usability evaluations to see how target users respond to a prototype of any level of fidelity. These are the best ways to ensure that any usability issues are ironed out before your product sees the light of day, and that your target audience will engage with it as you had intended.

This article was written as part of the April newsletter