BetaLabs

Beta Labs improvements for December 2009

I can finally shed some light into what we are doing in concrete terms regarding Beta Labs website. I know some of you have been waiting for news about these for many months and I'm confident we won't disappoint you.

I'm excited to say that the hard work our developers have put into the system will start to bear some concrete fruits.

Excited to hear what new things you'll get? Here are most of them:

Following applications

You'll be given the possibility to follow any application. One of the concerns so far has been that it is difficult to stay up to date with things that are relevant to you. By following an application, you collect it into your profile and will have an easier access to that application.

My Feeds

You'll get two feeds. One of them relates to the applications you follow. Once you've started following applications, you'll have a page in your profile where all new feedback for the applications you follow get aggregated to. Therefore, when you want to see what is happening in the discussion front relating to all the applications of your interest, you won't need to jump between forums anymore.

But, it gets better, and the other feed is even more valualbe: we'll give you a page that will show you comments to all threads you've participated in,  letting you easily check if those threads have advanced.

Feedback channel changes

You and the development teams have requested a bit more structure to the feedback channel, and we are introducing the possibility to subcategorize Bug reports as well as suggestions. Such a subcategorization was not feasible for discussions or reviews. This will hopefully make your life as well as that of the development teams easier.

Let everybody know if the feedback is helpful

This is a first step towards trying to weigh the value of feedback. So far, the feedback has been a stream of data, without much meta information. The teams as well as you have said you would benefit from a more systematic way of evaluating the feedback. We are introducing a very simple way of voting the feedback's "goodness": a simple thumbs up / down, or "helpful" or "unhelpful".

Gradually as we learn, we will start to use this information to e.g. highlight the most valuable answers, collapse unhelpful comments and so on. The idea is not to encourage competition, but to use this information of helpfullness to serve you and the development team better.

Editor's picks

The need of highlighting valuable feedback is very strong, but we feel the contributor of the month tradition has not served this need well enough. Thus, we are looking for other ways of highlighting good feedback and are hoping the Editor's picks will serve that need. In essence, we will give our development teams easy means of giving you credit - with a push of a button - and the most recent "picks" will be shown on the front page for everybody to see. It's basically a very lightweight way of saying thanks.

New beta types

During next year, we might start getting 3rd party betas to beta labs, as well as Nokia research prototypes. The latter is a flexible concept and might only be offered with availability to a limited geographical area. 3rd party beta testing will be offered to only selected companies that have partnership with Nokia.

Filter by device

Many of you have asked if we can just show items that are compatible with your devices. I still have to say that this is easier said than done, for example, it is sometimes unknown which devices an application might work with. That being said, we will make it possible for you to add Nokia devices you own to your profile as well as add the operating systems you use. If things go as planned, we will be able to provide you with one single download button that will give you the instructions for just your device. This is a complicated system that requires quite a lot of maintenance, back-end work etc and will not be perfect. However, it will again be a step forward.

User experience follow-up surveys

We at Beta Labs have a strong need to start measuring user experience systematically. The teams have so far asked you application specific surveys and will continue to do so, as the value of those responses are extremely high. Complementing that, we will start measuring user experience in a more structured way with common questions. After the launch of each beta, we will randomly invite some of the users who have tried the beta to fill a very short user experience survey. You can of course opt-in or out of this. Unfortunately, to be able to do this systematically while getting an accurate representation of the users, we will ask users to sign-in before downloading betas.

There are some other plans and development still on-going that will affect a smaller user group, things that I've mentioned earlier, but it is unfortunately still a bit too early to promise what that will mean in practice.

-Ilkka