Early Access
This week at Typekit, we launched an important new feature via a new “Early Access” program. Here’s why.
This week at Typekit, we announced the launch of an important new font subsetting capability, and that we’re making this new feature available via an Early Access program.
Early Access provides the opportunity for any Typekit customer — including those who get Typekit via free plans — to activate this new feature today simply by flipping a switch on their Account Settings page.
This isn’t a completely new concept for us. We used the same term when we launched Typekit desktop fonts in August of 2013. At the time, it meant that users could sign up for a waiting list, which we used to roll the feature out to our users gradually over a period of time.
We’re doing it a little bit differently this time, and I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts about how and why we got here. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think.
Ready or Not
The code behind this launch was substantively complete and ready to go at least two months ago.
Around that time, we started a private beta phase, comprised of around 100 users that we hand-selected. The group included “friends and family” power-users who we knew would be interested, along with users who had requested the feature in correspondence with our sales and support team.
This beta helped us find and iron out the few lonely technical and UI issues that survived our own QA process. But, after about a month in the private beta phase, with our planned public launch date rapidly approaching, we realized that even though we thought the code was ready, we weren’t sure we were.
We’d gotten some feedback from beta users, but it was a little… sparse. They mostly said “Hey, ok, nice!” But we could also see that only a handful of our beta users had put the new capability into production on their own sites.
Our twice-yearly all-hands Typekit meeting in San Francisco happened a couple of weeks ago, and that was the perfect setting for a long and lively conversation about this topic. It left no doubt that our engineering team was 100% committed and more than ready for the new features to ship.
But our product management, marketing, and support folks all seemed to agree that a little more runway would be ideal if we wanted to make sure that everything was exactly right.
More Beta Blues
We gave some consideration to doing a public beta, or to broadening our private beta, maybe via invitation or waiting list. But, in what turned out to be one of my favorite conversations since I joined this team, we came to some interesting conclusions.
First, we decided that there’s really no place for a public beta in a product like Typekit. Typekit is integral to millions of our customers’ web sites, and we want them all to trust that anything that appears in our product is ready for action. We don’t want our customers to wonder or worry about whether something in our product is “beta” quality.
Even though some of our customers are eager to get their hands on new capabilities like this one as soon as possible, many others wouldn’t think of implementing something that hadn’t already been real-world tested as widely and extensively as possible.
We also discussed how important it is to get early feedback from a diverse community of customers. This helps us ensure that our product and our help documentation are up to snuff, and it also helps prepare our customer support folks to handle the inquiries they’ll get once we go to public release.
Finally, we’ve developed a distaste for the false scarcity created by invitation-only and referral schemes. Honesty and transparency are core values at Typekit, and to us it just doesn’t feel right to give the impression that we’re favoring some customers and saying “no” to others.
Let’s Ship It!
The Early Access program that we used back in 2013 worked via waiting list. Customers who signed up for the list were given access to the new feature, in increments of a few hundred at a time.
Adding users in batches allowed us control the ramp-up in usage, which we needed in order to discover any scalability issues that weren’t revealed during our testing.
That’s not as much of an issue this time. So, as of today, you can simply turn on Early Access using a switch in your Account Settings. Here’s how it looks:
Customers who want to try out the new stuff can throw the switch, and the features are activated instantly on their account. And so far, it seems to be working pretty well. 24 hours after we announced it, more than 250 users had opted in to the program, and we more than doubled the number of people who used the feature.
Since we starting talking about the idea of “Early Access” at Typekit, I’ve noticed other folks trying out similar ideas. It’s not close to what you’d call a common practice, and there are probably some good reasons why.
But it’s an interesting idea, and I wanted to share it. I hope you’ll let me know what you think by commenting here, on Twitter, or by emailing me from my about.me page.
(Thanks to everybody who helped me with this article, especially to Sally Kerrigan, Gregor Kaplan, who wrote much of the code we just shipped, Tim Brown, Jeff Veen, David Demaree, and my amazing wife Jennifer Gormley. )