Matcher Launch Postmortem
On December 17th, I officially launched the Matcher system to a small group of coworkers internally. It was an exciting couple weeks getting everything working well. The following are my observations from the launch.
The Good
ExtJS is Wonderful
The new UI was erected in about half the time of the old jsp version. It also looks much better and is more interesting to interact with. What would have helped to make the jsp version easier would have been to establish standards up front and adapt them consistently across the pages as they changed. ExtJS provides those standards for me, making it much simpler to use.
Tournament System Development
The tournament system was developed as needed to play an actual tournament inside the office, and this approach worked surprisingly well. Whadya know, direct requirement gathering from the users as they used the product works! It is highly functional and during the tournament was more frequently used because it gave them exactly what they wanted.
The Not So Good
Small Betas Can Be Bad
I artificially limited the number of coworkers invited to the initial group to try everything out to less than half of the potential audience. I figured a slow throttling up of the user base would make identifying issues easier.
However, I limited it too much. Essentially the original invites went out to only about 12 people out of 30. Of these 12 only 4 people signed up originally, and only one of those continues to be an active user.
It Is All About Value
Asking someone to take two minutes to enter their information about a foosball game they just played is turned out to be a bigger reach than I thought. The Matcher system's fundamental exchange with users is two minutes of time for an increase in quality of time in a twenty minute match, and it doesn't appear to be worth it for those not currently using the system.
I'm currently doing some analysis as to how I can improve the value for users, and hoping to find fun ways to engage them. Yes, this means I'm examining the dreaded gamification and also spam. My goal for the end of this year is to increase active user count by about four times.
Too Many Features
Unfortunately, a lot of the features I invested time in have not been used to date. Again, it comes back to value. It is more interesting for users to see how they are playing in relationship to other players than it is to spend 2 minutes to try to challenge someone to a game they may not play.
The features I'll be working on in particular are User Profiles and the Challenges.
Conclusion
Overall, the launch of the Matcher project has been a success, but not without some underestimations on my part. I plan on continuing to develop it for the foreseeable future and hopefully provide more value to the users.