ChangeLog #3: Beta release and the start of something great
Total earnings as of March 18th, 2010: $0
In my last ChangeLog I said things were moving slowly – much slower than I would have hoped for. That’s finally changed! Development has really picked up over the last couple of weeks and I’ve been churning out new features and fixing bugs like nobody’s business.
Just ship it!
This week I did just that. On Sunday, March 14th, I released the very first beta of Every Single Shot. Hooray! The feature set is basic at this point, and there’s still a lot missing, but it’s up and running and out there for everyone to see and request a beta account.
It’s always fun wrapping up the first big release of a project. There are so many loose ends to tie up that go completely unnoticed until the last minute. Then it seems like there are 50 little tweaks that need to be made before it’s ready to ship. The ESS beta release was no exception.
On the technical side, I am extremely happy to see how well Amazon’s EC2 is working out. Aside from the ease with which sites can be scaled out, my favorite thing about EC2 might be the fact that starting up a new instance of a server takes it back to a blank slate. This saved me a lot of time and stress when I was trying to install an SSL certificate. I think I trashed 3 or 4 servers before getting everything scripted correctly. After I was done, I just restarted the server, and poof! – I had a fresh server up and running, with no evidence of all of the experimentation I had to do to get the SSL cert installed correctly.
Enough with the technical.
To all those hopeful entrepreneurs out there, coding away at night after their full time job on their pet project – just ship it! Get your project out there, let people see it, and don’t be afraid of their reactions. If you really believe in what you’re working on you have nothing to fear. Negative responses to your work are not negative responses to you – they’re valuable feedback that you can use to make your project better! Don’t assume that everyone will love what you’ve done, or that it will make sense to anyone. Just get it out there and then iterate like crazy. Of course, you need to figure out what it is people do or don’t like about your project, which leads me to…
Usability testing…or Why haven’t I done this before?
Steve Krug is not a rocket surgeon, just a genius. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go and find out, I’ll wait. If you are a software developer that cares even a little about the user’s experience (and not just your own), go buy both of his books (Don’t Make Me Think! and Rocket Surgery Made Easy) and read them cover to cover.
I did my first usability test yesterday and it went great, and here’s why: I didn’t take it personally. If you have trouble with negative comments about your work, go read Steve’s books. Hopefully they’ll give you some perspective to help you understand that those negative comments can and should be applied positively to your project.
Anyway, back to my first usability test. It really opened my eyes. I’ve got that classic programmer tunnel vision, having worked on ESS day and night for months. Seeing how someone else works through the app was enlightening – I came away with a full page of action items. The wonderful thing about these todos is that they came from someone NOT ME. Someone not invested on the project. Someone with a fresh perspective. They came from a real (potential) user.
My advice: usability testing – do it early, do it often.
If you want to try it yourself, have a look around Steve’s site. Especially check out the checklists and the example video of a usability test he conducted. And then get ready to work on all the action items you collect from your tests. 
Up next…
Every Single Shot’s future is pretty clear right now:
- Add features
- Run usability tests
- Repeat
It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that…
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