We are delighted to announce the public beta of Video First!

Background

2018 has been an intense year! It began with an idea – using video to capture, communicate and collaborate on user interface testing. We approached many software companies, gathered lots of feedback and started coding in earnest.

Private Beta

A big milestone of was when we did our first release of Video First in August of 2018. This was a private beta to a select few friends and family. At that stage there was no registration process so giving beta users access required manually inserting rows into our database!

When the beta release finished we had lots of chats and this resulted in lots of highly valuable feedback. This included: -

1. Onboarding – Blank project when logging in – where do we go from here?
2. Team – No ability to invite other team members, registrations etc.
3. Editing – Adding / amending test features / scenarios were very clunky.
4. UX – general user experience could be improved.

Public Beta

Armed with these valuable lessons we worked hard towards our next milestone – a public beta release where anyone could sign up easily just using their email address.

Probably the main complaint from the private beta was on onboarding. For example, when users logged in for the first time they were not sure what to do. We knew we need to quickly communicate the value of the product to users so we decided to show the users a demo project (AirBNB Demo) which users could interact with and see how projects can be laid out.

This enabled users to play videos, see comments from users and helped them to visualise how they could lay out their own projects.

Also, the public beta had team admin functionality like registration, forgot password, invite team members etc. This meant beta users could simply sign up with their own email and have a play about.

Also, we did various other improvements including more advanced editing and various user interface improvements to make the system easier to use.

Release Day

On the 15th of Jan, 2019 we finally did our beta release to the world. We are looking forward to loads of new users and gaining our next round of valuable user feedback.

Check out the following video to see the new Airbnb Demo in action!