Beta 31st January

I was using a service and it sent me emails, so I unticked all the ‘send me email’ boxes on the settings page. But then they had a redesign and changed their options, so I started receiving emails again, and this time they had more options for more things they could email me about. Again, I unticked them all. But yet again they changed their options (by the way, this was not Facebook, it really wasn’t) and I was pissed. So this time I tweeted what I thought about that: it was a pretty shitty way to treat your users. I got a message from one of the team saying “It’s not like you don’t know anyone here you could contact…”.

Now I’m really pissed

I’m not entirely sure why, but at least within a few small circles I’m a little influential. But to have a company come along and go “Hi, you know the right people, so we’ll go out of our way to treat you differently, so you’re tweeting nice things about us” pisses me off.

I know they are pretty terrible at responding to an average user. Now, if they had said something like “this is a problem that we have noticed and are working to deal with it” it would have been great, but an offer to go into my account and manually change it from the default settings says to me “we don’t really care about our users as long as we meet our targets, we just don’t want bad PR”.

Similarly, when I sign up to a beta for some new web service and I’m told I could get an early access if I recommend the product to my friends. Yay early access to a cool new thing! Erm, but wait, I haven’t seen that product yet, why am I recommending it to a friend? Is my personal recommendation nothing more than a metric worth less value than some adWords? So you’re asking me to pimp out your address book for the promise of what? Oh, right, you can’t even tell me because it’s a secret beta.

I should admit that I have gone and asked friends at start-ups I know to give me early access. Not because I felt entitled and should be pushed ahead of the queue, not on a promise of extolling their virtues from the rooftops. It was because those were my friends building something new and interesting, and I’m interested in what my friends are doing, and as a beta tester I would provide feedback, not PR.

Beta didn’t use to be a secretive, elitist marketing ploy. It used to be “we’ve got a product, it’s still a little rough, and we need feedback before we are happy to release it to the wider world”. When did it change?

Value every customer

So I say, please, have a beta, please, have a waiting list, and feel free to invite selected people ahead of the schedule. But not for their PR value – for their experience and the value in their feedback. Most of all, don’t have priority users: treat all your users nicely, not just the ones with the loudest voice. This is the most basic tenet of user centred design.