Here’s another little usability conundrum for all you user experience designers out there. This question was asked of me recently while designing an online transactional web application for a company here in Melbourne and I’d like to hear any suggestions you may have about how best to tackle this issue…

The client wanted to release their shiny new web app as soon as possible. The reasons for this from a business point of view were obvious, not least to get to market first ahead of the competition! In order to do this however, the plan meant releasing a basic version of the app with a limited feature-set first, with the intention of releasing updates over time, adding features within various sections of the application.

At the time of launch the full app architecture had been decided upon, with the final app to consist of a series of about 7 sections, each to contain a number of features. Some sections would contain all or some features available now, whereas others would not contain any until such time that they were developed and released later.

My question is this - Should the app be released with:

The full architecture in place with all sections and labels visible to the user such that they can get a feel for what will be the full app, even though some sections will be empty at launch (These pages could be populated with content about the features that will redide here eventually). The full architecture in place with all sections and labels visible to the user, but ‘disabled’ or ‘greyed-out’ until such time that they become ‘active’ and contain content. Only sections with active feature content visible, with a view to ‘turning-on’ sections and their relevant labels/buttons as the content is added.