: How do I announce an area-restricted feature without discouraging the rest of my visitors? I want to make an announcement to my users at my website about a new feature launch. However, in its

Vote Up Vote Down

You can cast it as an early report on your beta launch, or as a preview of your forthcoming launch. Assuming that you're restricting it now so you can work the kinks out before spreading more widely, it helps to also talk about what you've learned -- we found and fixed this performance problem at scale, we discovered that this one part of our user interface was confusing and did such-and-such to fix it, this week we fixed this many user-reported bugs (average turnaround time N hours), and so on.

Along with conveying news about your feature, for a beta launch like this you want to convey that there is forward motion -- that people who have to wait are benefiting from this wait. Assuming that the broader availability is in the foreseeable future, regular progress reports can also help you keep people interested -- this is the "update bulletin" model used by Kickstarter and similar services.

(0)