Adaptive Path Newsletter for December 16, 2008

Over the past several months there has been a steady stream of articles about good, bad, and ugly redesign roll-outs. I’ve paid special attention to these articles because we’ve been involved in a several roll-outs here at Adaptive Path. As a marketing guy, I sometimes work with our clients on the roll-out of our work, so I pay special attention to the way we announce, prepare for, and follow through with launches. Sending messages to those who will be affected and opening lines of communication for feedback may seem like an obvious part of a roll-out, but it often gets short-changed. Usability testing and roll-out planning are frequently overlooked all together because there is significant pressure to launch the %&#*! thing. Sometimes, the roll-out strategy and planning are simply overlooked, or underestimated, when a project is initially scoped. I’d like to spotlight roll-out strategy, to highlight the value of planning, and to point out three approaches that might help you plan for your next roll-out.

The Value Of Rolling-Out Right

Most people don’t like change, so roll-outs are inherently a tricky business. Put a dollar amount on the time you’ll spend managing a roll-out gone bad (not to mention the headache) and you’ll see that it makes sense to invest in planning up front. As athletes say, “it takes twice as long to re-hydrate as it does to hydrate.” In other words, the cost of playing catch up is much greater than preparing in advance.

A solid roll-out plan includes good follow through, that little bit at the end can make all the difference. You’ve worked hard to create a great redesign and you want to make sure that it comes to market in a way that complements the work itself. The perceived value of your team can be affected as well because their brilliant work will get lost if a flood of criticism rolls in without contingencies in place. Criticism is to be expected, it’s how you handle it that ultimately characterizes how your team is perceived. It’s important to stay on course towards the long-term value of your redesign, so plan out how you’ll respond to issues before they arise, and dedicate extra bandwidth to respond to the initial waves of reaction. If all goes well, you can use this extra time to sip some champagne.

Finally, the clearest articulation of value is expressed in returning business. Many organizations track attrition and conversion associated with roll-outs by comparing normal attrition/conversion rates against those during and after a roll-out.

Three Approaches To Get You Thinking

How you prepare depends on how significant your redesign is. Large scale redesigns often send the wrong message to the community because they are hard to tie to user feedback. They can cause the support network to break down, they offer less opportunity to build on the site’s legacy of interaction design, and they are always more jarring. In other words, I prefer a more Agile approach when possible, because this lets you roll out changes slowly over time and keep your community close. That said, there are different opportunities depending on what you’re launching.

Here are three archetypal approaches to consider as you formulate a plan for your roll-out:

• The Slow Burn: This is similar to an “early and often” approach and involves getting your initial message out in the context of a multi-part reveal that you’ll be updating at key points along the way.
  
  Media Impact: This can be helpful in establishing relationships with the media because you can build the dialog over a series of communications. This works best with more traditional media where journalists may be working on larger stories that require long lead times. You can still take advantage of exclusive releases and embargoed stories with this approach if you’ve got a good reason to do so. Obviously, there will be lots of opportunities for you to get the message out through your own communication channels, just make sure to honor whatever arrangements you have made with the media.
  
  Implementation: Changes can be released on a time-line with countdowns, where you give your community fair warning before they are implemented. If the changes are small enough though, you can sometimes migrate them without much of a fuss. Celebrate the best changes, and minimize the less sexy parts.
   
• Going Beta: This approach can be combined with The Slow Burn approach, or can be run faster, and usually includes an opt-in by existing customers.
  
  Media Impact: This has the advantage of letting the media get into the opt-in site along side the self-selecting members of your community. The good news is that self-selecting participants may be more likely to like the redesign, which means that media might be exposed to mostly positive feedback. At the same time, the media is less likely to make as big of a deal about a beta release (though there are exceptions to this because different sites interpret what it means to be in beta differently). If they don’t make a big deal out of it, then you should work with them to make a big deal of migrating from the beta to a fully rolled-out redesign. It’ll be a bit less dramatic though because the cat is already out of the bag.
  
  Implementation: When doing opt-in beta releases, you’ll want to make sure you have some sort of moderated feedback forum to collect responses from the community. It can be helpful to collect the most useful feedback on a board along with responses and/or explanations. This is important when you are working in the context of a site that has a tight community of evangelists.
   
• The Launch: Many people use this interchangeably with roll-out, but I think a launch is a dramatic type of roll-out. it’s not exactly a secret, but with this approach you’re artificially building pressure by creating a scarcity of information around your redesign. This can be very effective at generating a burst of coverage, and excitement in advance. This works particularly well when you are offering a stand alone service or piece of content that your community can line up to get. Though this was not for a redesign or a website, we used this approach with the release of our Aurora Concept Video.
  
  Media Impact: In this case it’s easier to set up exclusive coverage for a story, particularly if you already have a good relationships with the media outlets you plan on targeting. Embargoed stories may be required, but beware of “leaks” that may compromise your media relationships. Obviously, the more well known the service the better this approach can work.
  
  Implementation: The countdown approach works well in this scenario but be ready for hell to break loose if you haven’t done any test markets or beta testing. This is the riskiest approach, but if you plan well, it can survive some glitches. Think back to the launch of Firefox 3 which crashed their servers, but still set a world-record, and came across in a positive light.

Mistakes Not To Make (And Some Stuff To Watch Out For)

Some of the examples I cited in the introduction involve companies with significantly engaged communities that were affected by the roll-out of redesigned pages or websites. Earlier this year, Adaptive Path worked on a website with an active community as well, MySpace. When there is community involved, you’ll often see sites offering members a chance to opt-in to the redesigned areas to try them out. There are a couple of things to remember when engaging with such audiences:

• Remember that you’re working with a self-selecting group that may not be a representative sample of your community.
• Account for the fact that such groups tend to be more positive because they’ve actively chosen to participate.
• Provide a resource for the community to offer feedback and make it highly visible to both those in and out of the opt-in.
• Make sure that resource includes a means of acknowledging feedback with well moderated replies.
• Collect the most common issues and respond to them in a clear and concise way that is consistent with your brand personality.
• Be patient, and wait until new issues come up less and less frequently.

But beware! It’s possible to listen to all the feedback, and incorporate it in a balanced way, and still get massive resistance during roll-out. Perhaps Facebook did all of the above well, and even extensively tested the redesign to make sure it was solid. Let’s even assume that the redesign benefited from all the community input. That still won’t address the shock that the community will feel when they come to their Facebook page one day and see that everything has moved.

Sometimes this issue has nothing to do with the redesign itself. So what’s it about, and how can I avoid it?

• Don’t move too fast: Avoid going from an opt-in beta to a site wide roll-out suddenly. A banner at the top of the page requesting that people opt-in is not enough warning in an of itself. Give people time to figure out what’s going on. Some people touch your website everyday, others may only visit once a month or less. This means it may take time for the message to get to them.
• Don’t wait for questions to explain what you’re doing: Don’t forget to let the community know why you are doing this in the first place. I recommend building such messages into some sort of countdown. I’m not necessarily talking about a literal countdown, though that can work. I’m talking about a messaging plan that culminates with a message that reaches deeply into your community, either through your own communication channels or through those of the media.
• Don’t get distracted: Direct your energy to the aspects of the redesign that are most likely to cause a stir, and be prepared to support your decisions. The smaller issues aren’t likely to be deal breakers so don’t stress about the small stuff.

There are many approaches and pitfalls associated with rolling-out redesigns, but hopefully this has gotten you thinking. As is often the case, the single most important factor to consider is the end user. What is their experience going to be like, and what can you do to make the experience the best it can be?

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