Major update for Nokia Beta Labs website (early beta)
Now, this is going to be a bit ugly… But I’m singing happily “Don’t worry, be crappy”, as Guy Kawasaki famously put it, and doing it anyway. Feel free to hate me - please don’t blame Nokia.
Ladies and gents, let me introduce the new version of Nokia Beta Labs website. Thank you all, once again, for your feedback!
It is still very much incomplete and plainly broken in some parts, and we have dozens (hundreds?) of items to do before it’s ready (layouts, human-understandable permalinks, rss feeds, search, sorting, ratings & feedback system, etc, etc). But we decided to publish it anyway, so that we would have time to iterate it a bit before Tero Ojanperä’s grand demo next week. Nokia.com is going to the dark side of the moon during the Q3 results publishing period, and we couldn’t afford to wait until the site updates would become possible again.
Please help us prioritize our ToDo list, and maybe fill in the gaps: what would be the top-3 most important items that you would want us to implement/fix first?
Ps. Nokia Beta Labs blog will be transferred from blogs.s60.com/tommi to www.nokia.com/betalabs/blog during the next week or so.
Hey Tommi!
Shame on you. You have snagged MY blog illustration, haha!
Comment by Morten Hjerde — October 16, 2007 @ 9:39 pm
Well, le me start by saying I like it more than the original one, though not by far.
I like the way you guys built that blog. A little better than this one, but then again, it’s a secondary feature (sort of). I also like the Hot Topics part, which is a convenient way to let people know about new campaigns etc.
The one thing I can suggest is that you take the applications list from that itty-bitty lower-left portion and enlarge it a bit, make it more noticeable.
So, I for one like this new beta version of Beta Labs, and it can go a long way with some tweaking. Keep up the good work.
Comment by Bogdan Galiceanu — October 16, 2007 @ 10:21 pm
Morten: congratulations, you caught pants down using stock images!! Our new aviator illustration is indeed available on sites like http://www.istockphoto.com which, by the way, I love to use to illustrate my blog posts for $1 a piece. They said that we are free to use the image for Beta Labs, as long as we don’t care if some other sites will be using the image too. We decided not to care. But I sure didn’t see this coming.
Just for your information, we are currently doing the whole beta labs thing with an ultra-low budget, and the full-time Nokia headcount for the whole initiative is one = just me.
Yeah, I know that Nokia could well afford doing this with vastly bigger budget, and it probably will at some point. But until that happens, it’s kind of fun to live on a shoestring, using Wordpress, all kinds of free widgets, and dirt-cheap stock imagery. I’ve always liked it, as it forces you to be creative…
I wouldn’t like to change the image - what do you think, can we play along?
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — October 16, 2007 @ 10:26 pm
Great start!
I agree that “Latest applications” should be more visible, because it’s the main thing people are looking for.
A list of “S60 3rd edition” phones would be nice. There’s a lot of new Nokia phone owners who don’t know exactly what platform they are using, since this platform isn’t so clearly advertised in shops.
A lot of functionalities are missing, like filter by platform, search etc., but that’s understandable. As this site gets bigger, they have to be implemented.
I also found “Known issues” header and that’s promising, but where’s “Changelog”? Put it there.
I thought the aviator was Phil!
Those green “blog” glasses. Sigh… 
Comment by Heikki — October 16, 2007 @ 11:28 pm
You’re being too humble, it already looks really nice! One thing puzzled me is that the blog’s already there, but not completely in sync with this one or is it?
Comment by Jukka Eklund — October 16, 2007 @ 11:37 pm
It seems your new blog does not have an RSS feed…?!? *not happy*
Comment by jl — October 17, 2007 @ 5:56 am
RSS feeds for everything please: the blog, individual’s blogs, tags, etc. Wordpress and Drupal can do this easily.
Comment by Roland Tanglao — October 17, 2007 @ 10:12 am
Things are quite nice, but I thought you (i.e.Nokia) are working with some ultra-fancy and expensive advertising agency. Think you can afford that!
Comment by Horia Stanescu — October 17, 2007 @ 10:25 am
How about adding the download links as 2D barcodes as a standard feature?
Comment by Jukka Eklund — October 17, 2007 @ 10:35 am
No worries re. the aviator, we are all basically friendly people around here.
But I’ll probably get pegged as a fanboi because of the similarity. Well, in regard to the openness and dialogue you stand for, I certainly am! GL with the grand demo.
Cheers
Comment by Morten Hjerde — October 17, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
Very attractive and easy to use layout.
I’m sure it’ll impress your CTO!
Comment by HeavyLight — October 17, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
Love the redesign so far, and the simple layout. As you know, my top request for feedback would be forums / ratings so i can see what other people are saying about the apps, and what they score it etc.
Stephen
However, that’s probably one of the hardest bits…
Comment by Stephen — October 18, 2007 @ 1:26 pm
Thanks, good comments. We were thinking almost exactly the same items as first-priority improvements.
Comment by Tommi Vilkamo — October 19, 2007 @ 10:28 am
Nice Layout. But i miss the rss feed for the blog
Comment by Eismaus — October 19, 2007 @ 12:36 pm