Nokia Beta Labs 2.0 - please give your feedback by 26 September
We are planning to do a major update to Nokia Beta Labs website during October or so. Here’s the first draft 0.01, click the image: (special thanks to Stefan Constantinescu for his valuable feedback)
Let me explain the main points:
1. Name, punchline, and short explanation = top
The purpose of Nokia Beta Labs is to “engage Nokia users into co-creation of new applications and services”. That is, Nokia wants to create the future together with the users. We need to indicate this clearly. In addition, we need to ensure that everyone - both users and lawyers - understand what to expect. In practice, this means some kind of disclaimer like “Please note that the stuff here has some rough edges, yadda-yadda-yadda”, just like in Google Labs, Yahoo! Next and Windows Live Betas.
This part is not ready yet, but you’ll get the point.
2. Long list of beta applications = left side bar
At this section, all items would be listed, with their name/link and short description (max 3-lines). Now, we are likely to have more than a dozen apps & services available by the end of this year - and even more next year. As the list is growing, there is pressure to categorize the items somehow, and to highlight the most important betas.
About categorization, I’m not sure. Current categorization into mobile SW, PC SW, and services doesn’t cut it, because some of the items are likely to have all of these aspects. Another possible way to categorize would be to divide the items according to maturity: into experimental research concepts, previews of mainstream SW, and new versions of existing SW. What do you think, what would be the best way?
About highlighting the most important betas, it could be done based on:
- what is new
- number of visitors
- number of comments
- voting/rating system
- combination of the above (some kind of mathematical formula)
- editor selection (my professional judgment)
What would be the best approach? Or do we need to provide multiple views?
3. Beta Labs Graduates = right side bar
At some point, beta labs items will either graduate into an officially supported version, or withdraw quietly into an archive (some of the items at Nokia Beta Labs will be experiments that are not intended to graduate as such).
4. Beta Labs blog = middle
Here we could announce all new items, reply to public feedback about Nokia beta stuff, and get engaged in 2-way discussions about Nokia Beta Labs applications and about the whole concept. In short, this section will replace blogs.s60.com/tommi.
5. RSS
We’ll have an RSS feed for blog entries, and for the comments. In addition, I’m planning to tag each entry with the name of the app, so that we can get application specific RSS feeds. This enables the respective Nokia R&D teams to subscribe to application specific comment feeds.
6. What else?
I’m planning to ditch the discussion forums, mainly because we don’t have currently enough resources to moderate the discussion and to reply to people’s questions with any level of decency. This decision is not final, but let’s first try to manage without one.
What else should we have? You tell me. I promise to listen all suggestions, and then, make the final decision about what to implement at this stage. Some of your suggestions, of course, might be implemented later in future website upgrades.
Please send your comments by 26 September, as I need to freeze the concept pretty soon.
Heh. Let’s see how this works.
Update: comments thread closed. Nokia Beta Labs blog and all related discussions have been moved to http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog.
1. Categorization and search button
I can “see” these buttons on the top of the page:
a) search
b) platform.choose between S60 or series 40
c) category. choose between PC SW, device SW or both
d) ordering.choose between d1) newest one (which is the most experimental one, isn’t it?? d2) oldest one d3) A to Z d4) highest rating d5) most popular==which we can assimilate to most commented and we don’t fail to much in this assumption
2) IMHO forum is essential, no more reasons to tell, I’m sure you already knew them (BTW, with the forum you can have a large and valuable email database and you can mail the members about an application progress! that means=wining time for the feedback you’ve asked for, you don’t have to wait for feedback.
I have a big request: how can someone from your team post this: tested with Nxx not sure if working with Nxy or Exy?? Don;t you have acces to ALL devices? I really can’t believe that. THis sounded very superficial:-)
cheers
2. That’s going to be a long list! Would be good to have a seperate page as well. Categories (like tags
should also include what S60 edition the beta will run on (and perhaps also by individual phones but that may be too much). I’d expect a visitor will want to be able to just see those betas that they can install on their phone. The categories you listed would be good too (yes, all) and being able to sort using those.
3. Grads — good idea. Link to the release pages (if applicable). Also individual beta pages should say if they’re now grads and link.
4. Should you ditch blogs.s60.com/tommi? A Beta Labs blog might feel less friendly.
5. RSS (or Atom) feeds — good!
6. Make sure each download page has enough info about the beta. Give release notes. What is it? What does it contain? What should be expected? Let people know if there’s anything important they need to know beforehand. (For example, a lot of criticisms of the recent PC Suite beta was the huge download; if you’d mentioned that the stuff uploaded was intended for CD distribution.)
Also, how do folk leave feedback and report bugs? Comments? Feedback/report form? Something else?
2. That’s going to be a long list! Would be good to have a seperate page as well. Categories (like tags
should also include what S60 edition the beta will run on (and perhaps also by individual phones but that may be too much). I’d expect a visitor will want to be able to just see those betas that they can install on their phone. The categories you listed would be good too (yes, all) and being able to sort using those.
3. Grads — good idea. Link to the release pages (if applicable). Also individual beta pages should say if they’re now grads and link.
4. Should you ditch blogs.s60.com/tommi? A Beta Labs blog might feel less friendly.
5. RSS (or Atom) feeds — good!
6. Make sure each download page has enough info about the beta. Give release notes. What is it? What does it contain? What should be expected? Let people know if there’s anything important they need to know beforehand. (For example, a lot of criticisms of the recent PC Suite beta was the huge download; if you’d mentioned that the stuff uploaded was intended for CD distribution.)
Also, how do folk leave feedback and report bugs? Comments? Feedback/report form? Something else?
Forgot to say we need CHANGELOGS for every release!
Also relating to my previous comment to the other post - I think the discussion forum is not absolutely necessary, just some way for people to see OK, this is still in this early stage and to have some idea which problems other people encountered - so a blog with comments will server this purpose.
I personally would like to see a rating system split up in category to make the problems more transparent not only to you guys, but also to us nosy beta testers.
If you have separate categories like, let’s say
*stability
*ease of use
*features/usefulness
*coolness factor
it helps you get an overview.
If you can see that 20 people before you said the stability is crap but it’s ultimately cool, you might want to try but know it could crash every 5 minutes…
I really like the term “Graduates” - because it tells a lot about the hard work involved in getting an app out to the people and also the whole process.
Regarding sorting the apps - I think for the beginning a sorting according to newest would be fine. Later I would like to see different categories like best rated, popular (maybe have some backtracking feature, so most blog entries referring to this?), and also a rating according to maturity as the project teams see it.
Going along with the “graduate” scheme, you could have freshman, sophomore, junior and senior apps which then finally make it to graduation. This would also help with matching the apps with a maturity expectation.
I’d like the idea that on the left side would be a list of “hottest” applications. Formula something like 1/2 most downloads, 1/4 most comments, 1/4 editor opinion. Then a clear link to whole collection without any separate categories. Filter to adjust sorting to hottest, how far in development and alphabetical. How far in development could be 3 dots, with 3 reds meaning unstable, 2 reds 1 green something between and 3 greens a almost official release.
Changelogs.
Known bugs (if clearly known).
Compatible phones. Version of S60, with a link to list of phones with that platform.
I found the graduate thingy a little bit unclear, but ok.
And finally sad to see your blog ending. You won’t propably comment on things outside Beta Labs anymore…
That’s what came up on first thought…
A picture of you on the side with a link to your “About me” page would make the blog feel a hell of a lot more personal.
As for the list on the side left, I would give a user 2 choices:
Have a line that says “sort by” and let someone choose either “Release Date” (this would be the default selection so the latest products can be shown off first) and the other being “Most popular.” (I’m sure you could track that some how by number of downloads)
A search bar is missing
Personally I’m against Forums for now, mainly because people don’t want to have to register to submit feedback or talk about an application. They would rather do what I’m doing right now: Name, email, URL and CAPTCHA cose.
You have my number/email Tommi, if you ever need more advice just call, I’m honored to help shape the Beta labs future.
How about sending a download link to selected persons few days before making it official in Beta Labs? Just thinking about new N-series PC-Suite…
Heikki that was a very cool idea.
Nokia can avoid some very embarrassing moments:-)
I agree with Stefan - make giving feedback as easy as possible. Having to register will put off a lot of people (especially if they just want to leave a one-off comment about some app they tried).
Most of the feedback already given makes sense to me too. A few other points to consider:
- Avoid Flash - use nice, clean (X)HTML. Make sure it works on PC browsers, S60 browser (of course!) and anything else you can get your hands on.
- Make sure you have sane, permanent URLs. This is especially important for pages about the individual apps and such. If I link to an app I like from another site I don’t want the link to ever break.
- Link to the S60 wishlist? It’s not directly related, but browsing the beta labs projects might give visitors cool ideas. Make it easy for them to share their new ideas.
- Link to the “Open Source at Nokia” site since people visiting beta labs for interesting apps may want to check that out too. (Btw, you might want to tell those guys they have a lot of broken links at the moment …including the “Feedback” link! ;-P)
- Link to the applications from the S60.com phones page. It would be cool if when you look up a particular phone the page has links to all compatible apps on beta labs, open source at nokia , nokia.com and so on. I suppose this implies that your beta labs can display all projects that will run on a given S60 version/feature pack.
- Support for Gravatars on comments? ( http://site.gravatar.com/ )
That’s all for now. I’ll post more feedback and ideas if I have any.
Hello Tommi,
There are some great comments here, so it’s a good start to “initiate the start”.
I would like to have a comment about the discussion forum. Earlier I also concluded that the Blogging style is just one form of a forum. However, when thinking about it if you want to create a community - to induce a flow of creativity - I think a discussion forum format is more suitable.
Using the blog style discussion you enable the creation of a star like social network in which you can utilize better that you - and the actual topic - play(s) a central role, and so you must be VERY active in all topics to make them click.
In a discussion forum you would enable the creation of a more dense mesh of social network which would serve as a reactor where you play a “catalyzer” role. The reaction - feedback - there is happening between the parties and you are just there to control it. Looking at it like that, I wish there would be a mixed solution…
And finally: some ticketing system is inevitable to follow progress… in my opinion…
Here are my suggestions -
1. The only view for the betas on the left hand side should be by date. The newest softwares should be right there at the top.
2. You should have a separate page for the betas where you could have different view settings.
3. Interaction with the R&D team would be highly appreciated.
4. In the Banner on the top, Nokia Beta Labs should be the highlight, not Co-Creating the future.
5. “Creating the future together” sounds better than “Co-Creating the future”.
Infact even “Lets shape the future” sounds nice.
As of now, these seem to be things i could think of.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to comment - I am pretty excited to see what comes out it.
My initial comment is a fairly general one: Exactly how will users be “co-creating” with you and your team?
If the beta labs website is to be the main - maybe only - point of contact between you and the users, its function should be to support this “co-creation” process. Both in terms of the inputs you need/want and the information you wish to provide to users.
Some thoughts in this regard:
- I am not very fond of forums, so ditching it is no problem for me, but you should consider how to best structure user feedback. Are blog comments a manageable source of information for your purposes?
- What is the best way to provide a first-time visitor with information about an application? An overview based on application history, user feedback etc.
- Like other commenters, I suggest to employ one or more voting mechanisms. For instance, mosh.nokia.com has a brilliant feature which allows users to tick off, if they have made a specific piece of software work on their specific handset. This would enable you to easily identify problems with specific handsets, while also giving users some idea about what to expect.
- To best help users find software, I agree with the many comments concerning sorting/indexing applications. I think you should implement as many as possible: by date, by handset, by S60 version, by type, by popularity, by downloads, by matureness etc.
- Many of us will be blogging about applications coming out on nokia betalabs - are trackbacks a sufficient mechanism for you to “harvest” this kind of information?
Cheers
As you get comments it is important to acknowledge which ones you think are great. People will talk more once they realize that someone else is listening.
“I’m planning to ditch the discussion forums, mainly because we don’t have currently enough resources to moderate the discussion and to reply to people’s questions with any level of decency.”
Seems to be a wise move…
> As you get comments it is important to acknowledge which ones you think are great
Sure, I will analyze the suggestions, and post the conclusions next week.
I think it’s great.
But one thing that should probably be fused into it is all the great extra apps that are hidden in the Support sections of different phone models that actually work on all S60 3rd Edition (and 3.1) phones. Why hide them?
Please make it easier to find&get them.
For example, I have Snake 3D running on my E61 that I found in the support section of the late 3250. A truly great game that works great.
Tommi you are going a great job with this Nokia Beta Labs. Until you took charge not much happened since the start. Keep up the great work going!
I’m sure it’s a really fun job.
Oh, yeah. One more thing.
The blog should be on the far left… and the left column should be in the middle/closer to the left.
This will make it easier to read the blog AND follow what’s new and who’s graduated. It will also be easier on the eyes. (because then our eyes won’t be scanning the same center section twice when in search of a specific thing… some things I learned in media tech)
It will also look much more professional - nearly all top blogs (engadget, GigaOM, WebWorker, blogs.S60.com, s60tv …) have the entries on the left and the rest on the right in two columns
Thanks!.
Integrate both s60 wishlists to the beta labs, after all, whishes are intended to be taken, processed and the chosen ones may end up in beta, ‘ight, so in beta labs!
So you could have 3 major pans: wishes, betas (the ones that made it from wish to actual application) and graduates.
I don’t know if it has been proposed by someone else in the comments (long list of comments, can’t read it all), so sorry for wasting your time if it is already in someone’s propositions.
Addressing each point (with over lap).
1. I like this, anything that expresses the nature of beta labs as something a bit different is good. Its not a typical Nokia activity so it is necessary to communicate that to people
2. Yes this makes sense, it might also be beneficial to have a link to a static page (or the a blog index page) that details the application in more detail and lists the feedback mechanisms (comments / email / web form).
Clearly some betas will have multiple posts about them (and some wont), it would be nice if all posts about a specific beta could be accessed from one place / page.
One way to do this (or something that should be very prominently linked from the static page) might be to have a category or tag for each beta. The tag / category page for each beta could then act as a summary page of activity around that beta? It would contain all the posts on the blog about that beta.
I’m thinking something like:
http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog/tag/Gizmo
http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog/tag/Download
etc.
i.e. the same as
http://blogs.s60.com/tommi/nokia_beta_labs/
In your current blog.
If you dont have a separate static page then ideally the top post (pinned in some way) would be the generic information about the beta. The ones below it would be chronological so you could follow the history of that particular beta. (ie. use the blog as content management system with a clearly defined way of accessing information on one particular beta). You could have an RSS feed for each tag / category and for comments. (This would mean you didn’t have to subscribe to the comments for each post about a beta).
This might also encourage feedback to continue to be collected despite the fact the beta in question is no longer on the front page. I suspect there would be a tendency for a lot of activity around launch and while the beta is highlighted on the front page.
In terms of actual categorisation - I think this may be best done round experiences (multimedia, messaging, telephony etc.), but its a tricky one. If you get to a situation with 20+ betas it might be worth having a listing page separate to the side bar. I would imagine more than 5 or 6 betas on the side bar could get too long.
The dedicated page could have a complete list. The info would be the same as on the side bar with a link to both download / external page + plus the internal link to the respective beta labs tag/category page I mentioned above.
4. My only concern would be how scalable this is. Also do you tie in feedback received via email or via the feedback forms. I suspect you might get different types of feedback from different people via each of these channels.
Encouraging non power users to submit feedback is probably more important than getting the power users feedback since they make up the majority of people who will use the application on full release. I think these people may be more inclined to use feedback forms orr direct email.
5. The RSS stuff obviously makes a lot of sense. I would suggest making the two main feeds stand out (applications + comments). Too many feeds can be intimidating to those less familiar with RSS. Minor point (i.e. probably not worth worrying about), if you do make a mobile site either have redirection from the PC one or a mobile version of RSS feeds.
May also be worth offering and email option (if it can be done without too much work). Not everyone uses an RSS reader.
6. Other
Perhaps demote date archives and encourage archives categorised via the beta (e.g. the tags / category idea mentioned above). Is there value in date categorisation for a blog that is concentrated around feedback for individual betas?
I’ve sort of alluded to this above - what are the feedback mechanisms - just blog comments, or web form and email as well? Although there is a concern with confusing people by having three routes for feedback I think its probably OK. Some people will be fine with blog comments, but some people may be less familiar with it or want to comment privately.
It would be nice if each feedback route is highlighted in the blog posts / pages in question.
Sorry if some of this isn’t clear (and I know it repeats what has been said above).
Thanks Rafe. Regarding your suggestions:
2) Agreed. We’ll add static application pages, and consider adding “related blog posts” and “recent comments” at the end of the page
5) Agreed. We’ll promote only 2-3 feeds on the main page. And add “subscribe via email” option to new beta releases
6) Yup. Time might not be as important as categories.
Feedback mechanisms: blog comments and web form. In practice, the web form is an email box, so we could also publish its email address. The intention is that people could send feedback from wherever they happen to be - and we would take care of the rest.
Thanks!!