November 8th to December 23rd was a period of fast iteration. In these 45 days, we worked flat out to respond to user feedback and improve the site. We did 4 major releases and almost 10 minor patches.
Azhar remarked that he thought the team would be tired, but was surprised that folks were driving so hard. It seems the positive feedback from the usage numbers (which I'll blog about later) was inspiring us all.
Our first release was on Nov 15th
----------------------------------------
We fixed a number of key bugs including
- Some prices that were showing $0
- Some errors with shoes
- Removing some duplicates
- Fixing a UI issues that was confusing users about our detailed search
Mostly this was just bug fixes
In between we had a large meeting where many in the company gave their feedback on what they were hearing from friends and family. We compiled a list and set off to fix them.
On Nov 23rd we did another major release
---------------------------------------------------
This time the changes were more substantive
- We fundamentally improved detailed search (this was a major algorithm upgrade that just missed the release on Nov 8th and hence almost 2 months of improvements were waiting to be released).
- We had some complaints of speed and this seemed to be related to certain east coast ISPs. So we implemented Akamai and fixed som JS issues.
- We got a lot of feedback from users about wanting the price slider and the color picker at the top - so we moved it there
- Needed to improve our text search so we added the ability to handle more variation
- We added the hot picks section
On Dec 4th we did another major release
------------------------------------------------
- We rolled out our first price comparison feature
- We added more ways to sort your items
- We added the ability to browse by trend and celebrity
- We increased the length of descriptions
- We rolled out a new UI for our pop-ups (which have been hard to get right)
On December 23rd we rolled out our last release of the year and our largest release since launch
---------------------------------------------------------------------
- We rolled out the ability to search two new categories - Shirts and Sunglasses
- We improved our ability to find and analyze detailed textures
- We improved our comparison technology incrementally.
- We changed the logo color to a more muted blue. Why? Many women (our target audience) just felt that the bright blue was too tacky. You can't win them all...;-). Jacquie and Beth are the experts here and we go with their opinion.
Here is the old one
Here is the new one
Here is our new tabs showing the sunglasses and shirts
I am just amazed at how fast we moved. I personally went through every customer email we had gotten and responded to them. The fast iteration above basically solved all but two issues (these last two will take longer to fix).
This is a testament to the team. I it rare to have a launch that has so few issues that in 45 days you can fix almost all of them.
Comments