Question on user experience for a web app's closed testing environment..
Non-technical founder here, so bear with me :)
I'm curious as to what the "industry standard" is for how to structure a closed alpha/beta for web apps in terms of the domain environments as well as the relationship with the public marketing site.
Currently, we're just sharing our staging environment link with users and relying on email notifications to bring them back into the system (so they don't need to recall the staging link URL).
We're about to institute the live environment (app.webapp.com), which will obviously appear more professional and just makes for better/smarter workflow (dev, staging, live). My ideal scenario (I think?) is to configure the app to look for user sessions and then point the user to either the marketing site or the logged-in dashboard, based on whether or not there is a session active for that device & user.
But in the spirit of being frugal and scrappy, I'm wondering if this is worth tackling at this early stage, and frankly this is where my technical knowledge comes to a halt.
Any advice or experiences with other products that have done something well would be greatly appreciated!
Hey Peter, totally get where you’re coming from — a lot of us start with that exact setup. Honestly, your current approach works fine at the alpha stage. Later, you can split things like marketing.com for the landing page and app.marketing.com for users.
We did something similar when building <a href="https://picsartdownloadapk.com">PicsArtDownloadApk.com</a> — started scrappy, tested user flow through basic links, then slowly built structure as traffic grew. My advice: don’t over-optimize early. Focus on feedback, then polish the workflow once you know what sticks.
Wondering what you came up with. I'm new to IH and wish this post got some traction over the last 5 months.
Ha, same! Due to the nature of our social product, our testers definitely admitted that going to our testing server was hard to remember. So we ended up just having an open beta on the production server. Simply so it wasn't a hassle for users to join/return to, it seemed like really the only option.
One thing I just thought you could have done is have your users go to yourdomain.com and when they clicked login button it took them to dev.yourdomain.com ... or something like that. So they only had to remember the live domain, but links or login submit would go through dev site.
Always next time.
Very true, but the idea was to keep any random visitors from using the staging site (we wanted to keep a closed beta test group, basically). Ultimately, we just didn't do that, ha. So your solution would have worked as well