Safely Roll Out Your Next New iOS Feature

I’m a big fan of “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and his philosophy of how to work more efficiently. After reading his book, I was on a quest to find the best set of tools to help me get things done. I’ve tried Trello, Basecamp, Nirvana, Evernote, Asana, Mailbox, to name a few (though who doesn’t love the good ole post-it every once in a while?)

One important and time consuming task is pre-meeting research. Whether for an interview or sales meeting, researching a person or a company before a meeting takes a lot of time because the information is usually scattered in many locations. To help me efficiently complete this task I use Refresh.

Refresh.io is a mobile application that gives you the lowdown — the Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, info — about the person you are having a meeting with. It can also connect to your Salesforce CRM. Needless to say, it has saved me hours of prep time before meetings.

Refresh looks very similar to a calendar app but it lacks the ability to add a new calendar event. In this Teardown Tuesday, I suggest ways Refresh can measurably and iteratively roll out a new calendar feature.

I hypothesize that Refresh could save users even more time and become a more essential productivity app if it included calendar functionality. Today, it acts like a quasi-calendar, allowing you to view events, but you cannot add or edit them. In this Teardown Tuesday, I’ll look at how Refresh may be able to increase retention and time spent on application by rolling out new calendar features through testing.

Test Idea 1: Add calendar functionality with the + sign

Instead of having users jumping back and forth from their calendar applications to Refresh, it might increase time spent on Refresh and actually save users more time if adding events to calendar was possible directly in the app. Currently, the calendar view shows a breakdown of your day, the people you’re meeting with and a bit of information about the meeting. The + in the corner of each meeting allows users to add new people to the meeting.

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Instead of adding more people, Refresh could test an “add new event” page. To determine success, they could measure engagement with the “add new event” page versus “add attendees” page. Both these new feature implementations can be tested iteratively using code blocks to see how users respond to the changes.

Test Idea 2: Add post-meeting follow up

After a meeting, I want to be able to create a task to follow up. We can try a simple variation of “Write a Note about Ian” to “Schedule a follow-up with Ian” and see how people would engage with this action. Even if the calendar function is not fully developed, Refresh can measure engagement to gauge interest in the new feature. Once the sample size is large enough, they can roll out the calendar feature to their users.

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Ideas to increase retention or time spent on application come up daily, whether new ideas are suggested by your users or team, you should prioritize and test them! Testing iteratively with a percentage of your actives users can give you actionable data to see if a new feature is effective, before releasing new updates to all your end users.

Safely Roll Out Your Next New iOS Feature