What I learned at the beta test

We completed our first beta test of SWIFT Mobile this week at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.  It was the first time I had been through a real beta test of a new software product and I learned a few important lessons:

Why my iPhone was showing E instead of 3G.
In January I upgraded to a 3G iPhone.  It seemed so much faster.  I was thrilled.  But after a couple of weeks I also was wondering why I was seeing “E” and not “3G” at the top of the phone.  One of my super smart iPhone dudes saw the “E” and said “the AT&T coverage in Boston is horrible” so I thought it was the network.  But then when I got to New York and was waiting in line to register for the conference and chatting with two guys behind me about SWIFT Mobile, I saw their phones were displaying “3G” and mine was still on “E.”  They thought it might be a firmware problem so I ran over to the Apple store during lunch to see what was going on.  Lo and behold the phone was set to “E” for two months and I was not getting 3G speeds.  This setting is buried in the settings of the iPhone and I didn’t figure it out because I DIDN’T READ THE MANUAL.

Why am I sharing this?  Because NOBODY READS THE MANUAL.  And if you want people to use your app properly the user interface has to be both intuitive and compelling.  SWIFT Mobile worked very well for certain things — access to the schedule and directories of people — and failed at other things which were not intuitive enough.  These will be changed in the next version.

Mobile is about being unfettered and green
I purposely did not bring my lap top to the conference and I purposely did not take any paper hand outs so I could see how well I could manage the event just using my phone.  This aspect of SWIFT Mobile worked beautifully.  I could use my smart phone to send and receive messages, read the aggregated tweets about the conference, post notes and comments, rate the sessions I attended, organize and plan my schedule.  I believe “green and laptop free” are two really key benefits of a mobile meeting interface.  And we are going to work with our producers to give their attendees incentives to go mobile to save on printing expenses and paper waste.

Privacy is paramount
One of the features we built in was a personal scheduling system that automatically recorded the sessions you planned to attend in the main activity feed.  One of our users said of this feature:

I started using the SES swift tool yesterday and not knowing what I was doing I am in the feed way too many times. This is embarrassing. Can I delete some of these?

This was the one thing that people really hated about SWIFT and it was a violation of personal privacy.  This is an easy fix but one of those things that we just didn’t anticipate until we got to the event and heard people’s concerns about how this worked.  In future versions we plan to have much more fine grained privacy controls over what is public and what is private.

You cannot bypass marketing — ever.
Because we were finishing up the app just up until we enrolled people last week, we had no time to market the shift to a mobile meeting experience.  So we suffered in terms of usage because people saw the email come in and were intrigued but didn’t know enough about the benefits to dig in.  Or to do what I did and leave their lap tops at home.  So the next round will involve a series of communications that promote the benefits of bringing your smart phone to a meeting and explain explicitly how to use it in lieu of other tools.

I didn’t get the tiara
When you work so hard on something and are so close to it, it is easy to become myopic and biased.  I have to admit that I was thoroughly in love with what we did.  So much so that I was kind of expecting to be crowned the queen of mobile meetings on the red carpet of the event.  There was no tiara.  Just a whole lot of good feedback and exploration of where we go next.  And a clear sense that there is still a lot of work to do to get it right.  From here on in I will really work to maintain my distance from our product so that I can be a better judge of it.

Next step:  Sales
Now we move into selling SWIFT Mobile.  The good news is that I think we have clarified the features and benefits and have a pricing model that will give our customers good ROI.  If you are interested in a fuller debriefing and demo of the beta test site, please email me: kathleen@imswift.com.