"Out of Box Experience" (OOBE) is a term that usability researchers use to describe the first experience a customer has using your product. Good, or bad, it’s what often determines whether, or how long, your product gets used. So it’s got to be good.
Wendy has written some practical advice on evaluating your own OOBE with a marketing slant. She rolls up the customer experience beginning to use the product, with feature set, and channels to ask whether or not the product you build is wanted, easy to acquire and easy to use.
Interestingly enough, we’ve just gone through the same process at iotum. Our Asterisk integration kit has been a popular download, but not yet widely deployed by those downloading. We built it for a generic Linux/Asterisk distribution, which creates more work than many people downloading had anticipated. By zeroing in on a few of the more popular distributions (like Asterisk@Home) we hope to correct that.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
