The BigDoor Blog | Improvements

Software usability evaluation isn’t at all a new concept, nor is it exclusively the realm of bespectacled folks in lab coats, deftly avoiding eye contact behind one-way mirrors. Far from it – “discount” usability testing methods and tools have democratized the process nearly as much as cloud computing has done the same thing to scaling a business’s online infrastructure. (User interface evaluation is even being crowdsourced by companies like UTest.). But your fast-paced market probably demands that you be incredibly nimble and “launch first, ask questions later” – and hope your analytics, some A/B variant testing framework, and direct feedback optimize an initial design. But if you don’t take time to show really early, rough sketch stuff to potential users, “head slappers” – painfully obvious mistakes visible only once you stop protecting your early design from exposure to its intended audience – will lie in wait.

We recently tested portions of a major design update to our tools for publishers who design and deploy BigDoor’s gamification solutions to their sites. The goal? We wanted to learn if our introductory “onboarding” process demonstrated this new experience effectively enough to potential publishers to persuade them to sign up.

Findings? Nope. It did not.

But that’s really good news. Because we had several potential publishers attempt to complete this sign up process and share their frustrations/confusion, we were able to:

• Remove jargon and update terminology that explained little
• Identify a point where adding a couple of previews and simple callouts to explain “this does that,” and “this works like that,” makes all the difference
• Learn that once publishers did find their way through it was fairly easy to understand how to set up the site features they wanted to use

This post should also serve as a shameless plug for Silverback, a stylish, clever tool for video recording a participant’s face and the screen they’re working on, picture-in-picture style, using a Mac laptop’s standard video camera. The impact of the results above was much easier to demonstrate to the entire company with some key video highlights, and all the raw footage was right there on my laptop to work with the moment we wrapped up testing. Hugely useful.

Some imposter dramatizes a dialog box

The barriers to quick, in-house (and crowdsourced) methods for finding out how many head-slappers your early UI designs are lower than ever before. Huge ROI for a relatively tiny investment of time and effort awaits teams of any size.

- Matt Shobe, BigDoor Chief Design Officer & early stage mistake-maker

Every Wednesday we have a company meeting and our awesome dev team walks us through a Demo of everything they worked on during the prior week’s sprint.  At BigDoor we iterate on our platform weekly – we listen to and value feedback from our partners and incorporate as much as we can each week to make our product that much better through each weekly iteration.  Yesterday’s demo revealed a “surprise” which one of our great devs Brian Immel details below.  We took the liberty of posting this in its entirety but feel free to check out Brian’s blog – its chock full of goodness!

“New Features…..You Didn’t Even Know About”

Yesterday’s demo was exciting.

At BigDoor, the developers (myself included) Demo to the entire company everything we worked on during last week’s sprint. Honestly it’s one of my favorite parts of the job. We move so fast that the demo has become a greatest hits list of killer features that makes our platform so great. With so many awesome things coming down the pipe weekly, we set the bar pretty high. So to demo something truly impressive it’s got to break the mold of normal awesome and become uber-awesome.

During yesterday’s Demo, our fellow developer, Harley Holt gave us that opportunity.

Our weekly sprints are jammed packed with “stories” we’re working on. Usually this means new features, performance gains and bug fixes that are in line with our company roadmap.

However, Harley went above and beyond the call of duty. Somewhere between his daily work hours and getting a nasty ankle sprain playing kickball, he built something truly uber awesome. I can’t tell you what right now (awwww, you tease), but I will say it got me all giddy and giggly with excitement.

As a result, today’s demo was exceptional. At the end of our normal routine, Harley showed off the thing he’s been working on for the last few weeks outside of our normal sprints. No one asked him to do it. It was just a damn good idea so he led himself.

So kudos to the man. In my mind it was worth the ankle sprain, since we’ll see ripples from Harley’s work for months to come.

And that was all before 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Wonder what we’ll do tomorrow?

Recently we were happy to post some shout outs for our dev team, who executed a significant upgrade to our systems with minimal disruption. A flawless transition to keep things performing at the levels we expect. But how does the API usually perform? We wanted to share some stats regarding how quickly our API typically responds. Below are some external, minute-by-minute checks of our API from a diverse set of US locations. The following was taken over the course of a 24-hour period:

Average GET requests: Under 175 milliseconds
Average Leaderboard requests: Under 250 milliseconds
Average transaction POST: Under 400 milliseconds

By way of comparison, Facebook’s average API response time for us over the course of the last month has been 14,249 milliseconds.

The key takeaway here is: “Our tech boys rock” but in more technical terms: “We slayed the evil database monster with some crazy ass ops wizardry.”

Earlier this week during our weekly demo a conversation came up about intuitiveness and play, specifically how much CityVille nails it on every level. For those who don’t already know, CityVille is the hugely popular game that allows users to build their own custom city. The game launched a little over a month and just announced more than 100 million active users.

The game is simple, intuitive and encourages people to share and build their city so effortlessly that it’s addictive. Zynga’s CTO recently said, “The company’s ‘secret sauce’ lies in taking mechanics and themes from the gaming industry and making them simple, social and easy to learn.”

The BigDoor team began talking about how much we admire CityVille’s incredibly fun and easy game mechanics and how we’d like to emulate those same mechanics across the BigDoor API. We’re constantly iterating on our platform; we have weekly sprints in which we prioritize feedback from our partners and make upgrades to our tool set.

We can truly aspire to create something as great as CityVille. Their  numbers are astounding and really show the opportunity that lies in truly great game mechanics and social gaming! So the team was challenged with two things: continue working to create an intuitive, fun and simple user experience for the BigDoor API, and get to Level 10 in CityVille.

The challenge has been thrown down, now what Level are you?

Since our announcement of our public beta and fundraising almost two months ago, we’ve been blown away at the reaction by the market.  There is clearly a large and growing market interest in gamification and virtual economies.  In a startup there are no shortage of challenges, but we’ve been blessed to have been able to address the issues of capitalization and market desire in our first year (although these two are sure to come back into play again before too long) and are now very focused on what we call, “finding the love.”

What finding the love means to us is that we are on a mission to make our product both necessary and loved by a large number of customers.  We’ve already been hearing from a variety of our partners that the BigDoor platform has allowed them to launch game mechanics significantly faster and with more flexibility, functionality and insights than they could have accomplished without our platform.  We are encouraged and happy to hear those things.  At the same time, we recognize that in its current form you have to be a developer (or have one working for you) in order to use our platform.  That will quickly be changing.  Within the month we will be launching new functionality that will allow a non-developer to quickly and easily add game mechanics to their site.  We are confident that our first pass at this will need some work, but we’ll continue to iterate by listening to our customers, analyzing tons of data and asking lots of questions to prospective partners.

Finding the love is a journey wrapped in a process, and one that we are having a blast with.

Here at the BigDoor nerve center we had a bit of a busy week.  We announced our funding on Tuesday which kicked off some good press, which in turn kicked off a torrent of interest in our platform.  It is amazing how many times I continue to hear, “We were just getting ready to try to build out game mechanics for our site, I’m really glad I found you guys.”

This recent press resulted in hundreds of inbound contacts from interested publishers and developers, over 100 of which registered with us last week and began utilizing our platform.  Tripling the number of “active” developers and publishers working to implement our platform has uncovered a fair amount of things that we need to do better in order to make it easier to implement.  Dozens of, “Can I see some sample code,” and “How should I best implement your platform when I’m doing ___” requests have been an incredible help to us as we work to make our systems easier to use.  Feedback and questions are as important to a startup as water is to a traveler in the desert.  So this week has been like a fire-hose of goodness.

This feedback also resulted in a fair number of updates to our platform, which we will release tomorrow.  Look for lots more reports, better documentation, clearer sample code and a bit of an improved layout by sometime tomorrow afternoon.  Coming soon; some quick instructional videos for everyone (like me) who hates reading dry, boring documentation.

All we ask is that you keep the questions and feedback coming, we love it.  And if you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for?  Signup now and start adding game mechanics to your site or app.  Make our digital world more fun.