When we started building Gander — from scratch — last summer, we thought quite a bit about how to involve community in what we were doing.
We invited people to co-design sessions, distributed surveys, and pummelled our advisors for insight into how we could build and test better social media.
A few things became clear pretty quickly: we could make assumptions and rush into things to spin up “socials as we know it, but in Canada”, or we could listen, take our time, and do things differently at the expense of rapid growth.
We chose the latter. It wasn’t a fun decision by any means, but it was an easy one to make thanks to the community.
Not only did folks come out of the woodwork to volunteer their expertise and their opinions, but they came out in droves to act as beta testers.
I’ve not had a whole ton of experience with beta testing, but I have done more than my fair share of UX work where, typically, one might expect to test with 5-20 people before seeing diminishing returns.
As I understand it, that number might be 200 at the outside for an app.
We had 10,000 people sign up to test Gander.
And about 7,000 actually made it despite having to jump through some app-store hoops.
Did we get a lot of the same bug reports over and over? Oh yeah. And there were plenty to report over the past few months.
But Gander’s group of beta testers were so helpful, so kind, and really created a community unto themselves. They laid the groundwork not only for a better app experience, but for a better culture.
They showed us that we could start this off on the right foot, and no matter how many bugs we had to squash, we were on the right path.
They ushered in Bloomscrolling, created a Pet Tax, helped each other navigate things and showed us unreasonable amounts of patience with each release.
So, I’m immensely grateful to Gander’s beta testers. We all are. We can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done and continue to do.
Thanks, beta testers.
I hope you have a stellar, well-deserved summer.
