This feature article is a write up of the Engaging the Early Adopter session held at Orange Code Camp 2005 in Opio. Further details of the Orange Partner Program and future Orange Partner events are available on the Orange Partner website.
Alan Blount, a Consulting Engineer from Orange T&I Boston, gave developers his perspective on how they could engage the early adopter, by using web-based user forums, to test their concepts and applications, improve their implementation and create early buzz about their products by drawing on his experience with the Orange Scribble application.
He summarised the ideas and principals behind website community forums: they are open, anyone can read, and free registration is generally required to post. Information and discussion is threaded by category and topic and is persistent, discussion can progress over weeks or months, and the resulting content is archived. Such forums are independent of handsets manufacturers, and mobile operators and are the home of the early adopters. There are both general forums such HowardForums, and platform or device specific forums such as All About Symbian (Symbian), Esato (Sony Ericsson) and Modaco (Windows Mobiles).
As an aside Blount pointed out that mobile phone discussion ranks somewhere between cat ailments and home expresso machines as a topic for Internet discussion! However the number of posts involved in all cases was very large – some 10 million messages on just 8 of the better known mobile phone boards.
The importance of the influence of the early adopters was outlined. These are the people who create buzz about a product and will recommend things they like to family and friends, and are largely responsible for the hard to attain, but potentially very beneficial product buzz.
Blount advised developers that in order to engage with these communities there were certain recommendations that should be followed. Firstly it was necessary to have a product, ideally both for the PC and for the mobile device, that allowed users to download and get information about the product, it is also helpful to have a big tracker and a developer blog so that users can feel they are interacting with the developer. The second recommendation was to carefully consider who should interact with the forum and how they should do so. Blount said different people had different perspectives, while the product manager would have good communication skills and overall responsibility for the project a developer would be more familiar with the codebase and better positions to entered bugs into a tracking system.
Furthermore the actual interaction itself was important, and it was stressed that it was good practice not to just dive into the forum only when you want something, but instead to build a reputation in the forum by becoming a member of the community and being charming and polite.
Choosing at which time in the product development cycle you should engage the early adopters was also considered. Too late and the benefits will be produced, but too early may result in user pain which puts people off. Blount recommended that while failures were acceptable, developers should strive to do no harm, and argued that there were acceptable failures (unimplemented featured, application crashes, handled failures) and unacceptable failures (GPRS / Battery burners, handset crashes, interference with telephony functions).
The example of Orange Scribble was then shown, from the initial asking for feedback message to the conclusion of testing. From this several principals were drawn: be friendly and straight forward, ask fro you want, and promise what you can deliver (respond to feedback you receive, advise of lockware and future charges if the beta is free).
Blount concluded by reminding developers to speak with a human voice and suggested that given the time and costs involved a small rewards as a thank you for testers (such as a t-shirt) was a good idea.