Release Early, Release Often
Francis Irving, mySociety
GCExpo, 13th June 2007
Best practice seminar in Citizen engagement
Involving the end user in service creation and design
Building action-oriented websites that deliver
simple, tangible benefits
at very low cost per person helped
Two sorts of projects
Grant funded
Commercial contracts
Release early, Release often
- Robust and minimal
- Encourage feedback
- Implement
- Iterate frequently - five minutes!
People ...
- ... will never do what you expect them to do
- What irritates them?
- So fix lots of small things
Emails to councils improved
(Government is a user too!)
- Reordered email
- Added address details
Public sector example
- High profile
- Over 3 million users
- Just over six months old
Released early, Released often
48 hours after launch
- Expats / overseas military
- Sort list of petitions
- Added search facility
- Very high profile website
- Explicitly said it's "beta"
- Users loved it
To recap...
- Release early, release often
- Robust beta version as default
- Improve iteratively with your users
NeighbourhoodFixIt.com
petitions.pm.gov.uk
Francis Irving
