Soft Opening

Soft Opening is a tradition at ETC. Here’s the description: (from Drew Davidson)

In the theme industry, it’s called “soft opening.” In the theater, it’s called “previews.” In software, it’s called “beta release.” In all cases, it refers to “we believe it is fully ready” but also carries the acknowledgment that it probably has a few kinks that should be ironed out, but can only be ironed out by showing it to real customers, in allegedly finished form.

At ETC we do a soft opening for projects every semester at Week 14. Faculties will visit project rooms and look at the product to make sure that we have the deliverables that we promised at the beginning of the semester.

This semester, because visiting the project rooms is harder than usual, we are doing soft opening via Zoom!

We first gave the background and an overview of our project, then we showed them our three deliverables:

• A Deployed Web-app
• Tools for Client
• Documentation

We used Zoom on both mobile and desktop to show our products.

It lasted one hour, and it seems like they are satisfied with our web app, and understood that we only have sample data now. They were worried about the usability of the tools we created. They recognized that we had a lot of documentation, but they think we need to make them more organized.

Here are our takes:

• Ricardo was confused about the map at first, but after we explained the 5 themes, he understood it
• Tools – make more warnings to the user when they do “delete” actions
  • Also, make backup data
• Tools – need the client to test it and give feedback
• Documentation – we have a lot of documentation, need to add an index
  • Tell them why/when should they read this documentation
• Lack of final data representation for our client
  • Need to think about how can our client access the feedback data easily
• Need to hear more from the client their feedback
• Stress testing
  • Can make simulators

***One surprise from softs is that we had 10 (or 11) faculty + staff joined our soft openings! There were a total of 15 people in the Zoom meeting this morning! I’m very glad that so many are of them attended. 

Shirley said this might be the biggest soft opening at ETC 🙂

Tools

To make it easier for our client to generate QR code, or update booth info, we made a tool page for them. We made it very easy and clear so that non-tech people can also perform those actions.

It has a lot of features, you can generate QR code for attendees, update booth info, export user data, and clear data from the database. 

To make it even more clear, we made a manual for the tool page. We documented the steps you need to take to perform each action, so there’s no confusion about functions for different tools.

Since the usability of the tool was questioned a lot during the soft opening, we are asking our clients to playtest the tools, to make sure that they know how to use it and successfully get the results they want!