Tommi's reports from Wonderland

September 25, 2007 Nokia Beta Labs website renewal: recap of your feedback Posted by Tommi at 03:02 PM | Categories: Nokia Beta Labs

The feedback thread about Nokia Beta Labs website renewal has calmed down ahead of schedule. Thank you all for your feedback! In general, you seemed to like the new concept.

Here's a recap about the improvement suggestions I found most relevant.

1. Make Beta Labs Application Catalogue the most prominent item

Agreed. Looking at the draft 0.01 layout, some people might interpret the application lists as Google ads or something.

Benchmark: Vodafone Betavine.

2. Show the numbers (# of pageviews, # of downloads, # of feedback emails / comments, voting results, etc.)

Agreed. This is probably not feasible in October timeframe, though.

3.a) Categorization / tagging
3.b) Own page for application list and ability to sort/search them based on different properties

Agreed. The user should to be able to sort the application list by platform, by device, by PC / phone / web, by release date, by voting results, by popularity, by "heat" of discussion, by maturity, etc. This is probably not feasible in October timeframe, though.

Recommended reading: Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.

4. Search

Agreed. We need to add a search box, and it should be focused on the Beta Labs site, not on the whole nokia.com.

5. Graduates: add links to commercial offering

Agreed.

6. Look&feel: more color, please

Let's see.

7. Banner

Agreed, Nokia Beta Labs should be the highlight, not "Co-creating the future".

Speaking about the punch line, which one would you prefer:

8. Make sure each download page has enough info about the beta.

Agreed.

9. Make sure it works on S60 browser

Agreed. We are thinking about creating a mobile-friendly version of the site.

10. Make sure you have sane, permanent URLs

Agreed.

Because the categorization and even application names might change, I'm thinking that the current non-descriptive URL:s such as http://www.nokia.com/A4568203 might still be the best way forward. Right?

11. Link to the S60 wishlist?

Good idea. Must think about this, especially when the amount of feedback grows unmanageable.

Benchmark: Dell IdeaStorm.

12. Link to other relevant Nokia application sites

Agreed. And vice versa.

13. Support for Gravatars on comments? http://site.gravatar.com/

Isn't this a niche thing? I wouldn't want to implement this if only 10% of commenters would use it.

14. Employ voting mechanisms

Agreed. Needs investigation and more work. Not feasible to implement everything in October timeframe, though.

15. "Crowdsourcing" device-specific compatibility list (à la Mosh)

Not a bad idea. Needs investigation.

16. Official RSS feed about new application releases (in a more corporate-speak format)

Maybe.

17. How about sending a download link to selected persons few days before making it official in Beta Labs?

Worth a thought. However, I typically don't get the beta-level software package until just before publishing. Therefore, giving the download link to a selected few would postpone the launch by a couple of days.

18. The blog should be on the far left

Not sure - but we'll think about it.

---------

Comments

So, the lists are done! Let's see the changes:-)

Uh. Dumb me. Why did I write the recap before deadline? All About Symbian's Rafe just wrote a great comment:
http://blogs.s60.com/tommi/2007/09/nokia_beta_labs_20_please_give.html#comment-18301

I'll take that, as well as other comments you send before the deadline 26 Sept, into account before making final decisions about the website.

Please please move the blog to the left!
It will at least be easier on My eyes.

It wouldn't be true if I would say that I would not use Betalabs if you leave it in the middle, but that's almost true.

You could create a research study... or just listen to me. It will be much much easier on the eyes (especially newcomers).

Thanks Tommi. You're doing good. Moving quickly from theory to results. That's how it should be.
Read my post over here: http://s60tv.com/2007/09/25/when-fans-are-heard/

PS: what's the max amount of links? I only have one!! It's a bit ridicilous.

I like the nokia.com/A15345342 links, AS LONG AS THEY DON'T CHANGE!

And gravatars seem useless

just to make it explicitly clear, all content should be user taggable and their should be RSS feeds for each tags and those tags should be s60.com/tags/tagblah NOT technorati tags

and of course don't write this from scratch please. just use an off the shelf open source system like Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla or whatever

Thanks for taking the time to take feedback and respond to it!

...Roland

I can live with links a la www.nokia.com/A12345 as long as they do not change, but I think www.nokia.com/betalabs/appname would be even better (Imagine telling your friend over the phone about the site - which URL is more memorable?).
If your CMS won't do this out of the box, have a look at Apache's mod_rewrite (see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html ) or equivalents - they may help.

As regards, apps that change name - that's no excuse to remove the old URL! By all means add a new URL, but keep the old one and make it redirect to the new page (see http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/reback ).

Sorry for getting bogged down in technical details btw - it's just the web-design geek in me coming out! ;-D

As for the Gravatars - I agree it's gimmicky, but it's trivial to add and can be fun.

You write:

S60 platform is constantly improving, and Nokia R&D teams - often targeting to future devices - tend to push the limits and use the latest platform functionality. Therefore, in Nokia Beta Labs: - compatibility tables are sometimes complicated - even the R&D team might not be 100% sure about the compatibility - we may need to release separate versions for certain devices

Hopefully this experience also gets fed back to the S60 core R&D team, because it may be the closest to "dogfooding" Nokia's own platform - this exactly mirrors the experience of developers out there, so this would also be a great way for collecting feedback on the developer experience.

As an example, if Beta Labs R&D can't be sure about compatibility of certain features, doesn't that say something about the level of documentation?

What about a possible: "Lead. Create. Inspire" slogan? There are only strong/active words here. Just my 2 cents.

> "Lead. Create. Inspire" slogan

Yup, stong words. But I don't understand the pupose of Nokia Beta Labs from that.

Here's what I'm trying to achieve:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/mantras_versus_.html

a suggestion on the working of Nokia: be more transparent and communicative with users.

I'm interested in the E90, but there seems to be some problems with it. The production is even said to be stopped, but there's no confirmation and no communication at all from nokia, apart from deleting some lengthy threads on the forum.

If there's no communication on a current situation (production problems) I suppose there won't be any communication about software updates. This is confirmed by this post in which an update for the E65 is announced, but the poster hasn't event a slight idea of what it will bring!

If I get a E90, I'd be interested to develop for it. But coming from Free and Open Source software, I'm not sure I'll get used to this secret kept around Nokia development. I don't request to go open source, but take a look at QNX: they're going more transparent!

It's funny how companies in communication products have the most difficulties to communicate with their customers...

Raph

@raphinou
This is a kind of a "crowdsourcing" blog, so no connection with E90 feedback:-(

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