A software company didn’t design one of the best new online tools for the Church; the Digerati team at LifeChurch.tv did. YouVersion, which reached public beta in fall 2007, is an online Bible unlike any we’ve seen before. Searching different translations online for keywords or references is nothing new, but tagging passages with your thoughts, photos, and videos is. Sharing that content with others and sifting through their contributions is also unheard of, at least when it comes to the Bible. The genius of YouVersion is that it applies familiar social web activities—tagging media content, commenting, and engaging in online community—to Scripture rather than relegating those activities to the just-for-fun realm of Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc.
We’re so impressed with YouVersion and its potential to inspire individuals and church communities that we wanted to know more about its conception. For that we spoke with Terry Storch, LifeChurch.tv’s Digerati Pastor.
COLLIDE: Where did the idea for YouVersion originate?
Terry Storch: Bobby [Gruenewald, LifeChurch.tv Pastor and Innovation Leader] has a passion and desire for Scripture engagement. A lot of folks have a Bible, or at least connect in one way, shape, or form with the Word, but his passion was about being engaged with the Bible.
He brought that idea to me and some others on the team, and we talked about what that would look like and how we could facilitate real Scripture engagement. God got a hold of it, and it turned into what it is today.
COLLIDE: There are several online Bible resources that have been around for a while. Is the social Scripture engagement aspect of YouVersion what you think sets your site apart from other sites?
Storch: Yeah. What we wanted to do was leverage a lot of the simple technologies on the web today—i.e., Flickr, YouTube, and media options beyond just print. If we could integrate those types of media into the Word, it would really enable engagement. So when I’m reading the Word and a Scripture verse really jumps out at me and it’s a verse that reminds me of my kids, I can now tag that verse with a picture of my kids. And that brings engagement. As I’m memorizing, as I’m reading, or as I’m sharing with friends or family, I’ve got this connection between this Scripture verse and this picture or video. Media allows Scripture engagement to go beyond just text.
COLLIDE: With all of that in mind, can you give me an overview of how you went about planning and developing YouVersion? I’m sure it kept growing and shifting, but how do you go from an idea in a conversation to starting the actual project?
Storch: The process was pretty organic. It starts with the idea and concept phase, which is a whole lot of talking, sharing, and conceptualizing. Bobby and I were very much a part of that whole process, and then from a design aspect, YouVersion burst out of a whole lot of sheets of paper—I’m a very pencil-and-paper kind of wireframe designer.
We started with pencil and paper and sketched a whole bunch of stuff out. Then we moved to a whiteboard and said, "Is this what you’re thinking? This is how I see it working." We’d erase a whole bunch of stuff and start over a lot of times to get the front-end concept down.
On the other hand, the back-end aspect and the core functionality are normally driven by what the interface needs to do and what the tool requires. So I normally start from a design, and then hand that off to the smart folks to figure out how they’re going to make it happen.
COLLIDE: What would you say was the biggest challenge in that process?
Storch: There were a lot of challenges. One of them was the underlying technology that we ultimately landed on to make it all happen—it’s complex. We’re blessed and fortunate to have some sharp back-end guys on the team that could build it to scale, so it could handle 200,000 iPhone users and hundreds of thousands of mobile users. There have been some Bible sites that launched and became pretty popular but couldn’t handle scale. So we wanted to make sure that the user experience wouldn’t be impacted if it became successful which was a significant challenge.
Another significant challenge was the timeline that we put ourselves on from concept to our alpha launch—just under three months. We had a lot of people involved, and most of those people were remote. So just pulling all that together was challenging.
One of the most significant challenges was—and we still have a long way to go with the user experience—how complex the tool is: how do we keep that as intuitive and simple as possible for the end user? I think we did a good job in certain areas, and in other areas we could’ve done much better. In those areas we’re coming back now and tweaking and making some adjustments.
COLLIDE: You mentioned going back and tweaking the user interface. In what other ways has YouVersion changed from the original concept that you started building from?
Storch: Our users have been fantastic in giving us feedback. Since we launched it in private alpha and continued through the process, we’ve asked our users to give us feedback, and they’ve been amazing. We’ve got a lot of passionate regular users that we listen to, and they’ve helped improve the site.
One of the concepts that changed a bit, and will change as we mature the product, is our original concept of friends. Before, we thought the friends’ concept would be bookmarked friends and people that you could invite to the system—a real standard address book. But as we processed through and saw how people used the tool, we moved toward the ability to follow people and get their RSS feeds. The RSS feeds allow the user to find someone in the system and then follow those people, and those people that you’re following are your friends. It was never in the original plan to do it that way, but we’re seeing the growth of that just exploding.
COLLIDE: Where do you guys go from here? What other things do you have up your sleeve?
Storch: One thing that we were talking a little bit about, which feels like we’ve been doing it forever, is the YouVersion iPhone Bible app. This was another rapid development. We believe that mobile is the future, and the future is now. We wholeheartedly believe that—think beyond just the iPhone, but all mobile devices, the millions upon millions of people all over the world carrying mobile devices.
Knowing that, we feel that mobile is a bigger opportunity than the web. So a couple months after YouVersion launched, we officially launched our mobile version available at m.youversion.com. We saw that just explode. When the App Store was announced, we were all over that, and started the process all over again. The UI (user interface) on an iPhone is radically different than anything we’ve ever done before, so we started from scratch. We knew that with the amount of time we had until the App Store launched, we couldn’t be everything, and we weren’t sure that everything needed to be there. So we asked ourselves: “What does the roadmap look like? What can we get out in the timeframe we have and what does the pathway for the tool look like?”
Again, we sat down with a whole bunch of pieces of paper and a whiteboard and scoped [the iPhone application] out. When the App Store launched, the Bible application was there. Seeing hundreds of thousands of people download it and use it on a regular basis has just totally blown our minds.
One of the next big things that YouVersion will release is localization. When you’re on your device and your device is set to Spanish, it’s all going be in Spanish—not just the translation, but the entire user interface—or German or French or Portuguese. Localization is extremely important to us, and we have a lot of energy being spent right now to localize the tool.
COLLIDE: I asked Bobby this question about One Prayer, and I’m going ask it of you about YouVersion: To a lot of people, it might seem counterintuitive for LifeChurch.tv to put time, effort, and money towards something like YouVersion, which won’t likely grow LifeChurch.tv in the traditional sense (more attendance, more giving, etc.). What’s your philosophy on how you invest LifeChurch.tv’s resources?
Storch: Can I get you to tell me how Bobby answered that question?
COLLIDE: Sure …
Storch: (Laughter) No, I’m just joking.
COLLIDE: I understand, you guys need to put up a unified front on that issue, right?
Storch: Absolutely. I think number one is that we have a passion for the Church. We have a passion for reaching people for Christ. We have a passion for Jesus. And I believe that that passion transcends the four walls of LifeChurch, and we feel a responsibility to extend the message of Christ to the world.
In everything that we do, there needs to be a balance. You’re right, the LifeChurch.tv name is not front and center with YouVersion at all, and we actually think that’s a really good thing because it’s all about Christ. It’s all about the Word, and we feel that’s very critical to what LifeChurch is all about. We believe that if we are honoring God by being a part of the global Christian community and building tools that honor Him and can engage people in Scripture, then that’s a great thing.
COLLIDE: That’s close to what Bobby said.
Storch: Perfect. (Laughter)
COLLIDE: How do you gauge the success of YouVersion? How do you know if it is accomplishing what you hoped it would accomplish?
Storch: There are some simple ways. We have analytics and metrics that we look at every day—is it growing, are people connecting, are new users coming into it? But ultimately, since the tool is about Scripture engagement, that’s what is most important to us. The iPhone app has been out 16 or 17 days and in that amount of time we are approaching almost 18 years of time that people have spent with the Bible open on their iPhones. Nearly 18 years of Scripture engagement has happened in just over two weeks, and that’s mission accomplished for us. As people read and engage the Word, it becomes a part of their life, and we believe that will change them and change the world.
At the end of the day, that’s the measurement for us: that people are engaged in Scripture, they’re sharing it with their friends and family, and building community around God’s Word.
To try YouVersion for yourself, visit www.youversion.com.