When to launch…
I’m a perfectionist, and therefore never happy with the work I do.
For many years I worked in magazines, mostly monthlies, and there you’ve got two completely contradictory drivers. One, to do the best magazine possible; and two, to get the magazine out on deadline. You can’t do both, so you end up do neither, or choosing one.
Given the potentially dire consequences of a magazine missing its deadline (print and mailing slots, problems with advertisers and retailers, etc), you always go for the deadline.
Launching a new website is a little different, particularly if your not working for a big company which has its own internal deadline (this financial quarter, etc). When do you launch? When it’s ready. When is it ready? Well, for a perfectionist, never.
Never is not a good time to launch, so when do you go for it? For Autopendium, I’ve decided to pick two (fairly arbitrary) milestones. The first was usability/usefulness, and the second was an absence of (known) significant bugs. The second is easy (only a couple more to go), the first I judged thanks to a good friend of mine, Julian, who I got to do some usability testing.
Julian is not entirely a typical user (he knows far more about old cars than most other old car owners, and currently has about 11 of them). He also really doesn’t like using computers (though he uses one for work every day), and isn’t big on spending hours browsing the web. Oh, and prior to doing the testing I had told him a bit about Autopendium, and he wasn’t interested.
So I wasn’t expecting much from the testing, except that he would find lots of things he didn’t like, didn’t get, and didn’t want. Well, there were quite a few issues the testing brought up (nearly all now fixed), but the main thing that convinced me that I should launch now was how much he enjoyed using the site, to the extent that the testing took twice as long as expected.
So, is the site perfect? Nope! Are there lots of things I would like to improve, features to add? Damn right! Is it easy to use and useful? I think so, but please do let me know. Launch is set for this Friday (15th).
