NokiaBetaLabs

Minutes on the latest chat session

We had a chat session last week about Beta Labs where we discussed some things that you, the users, feel should be improved. There were perhaps 10 of our community members there and I'm very satisfied with the session. It's always good

Based on the results of the satisfaction survey, I was anticipating two things to be brought up during the chat:

1. Our users don't feel their feedback isn't appreciated, and
2. There is always a need for more content in Beta Labs

And both did come up very early in the discussion. So, noted, we understand you are unsatisfied with there and we will take these things into consideration when we make decisions regarding the future development of Beta Labs. I can't promise we'll fix these to perfection right away, but I can assure you these will not be forgotten. There's only so much we can do about the content in Beta Labs, but one interesting idea has been opening the service to 3rd parties.

About appreciating your feedback more (or making you feel more appreciated for the feedback) there is an on-going discussion. The problem is with the feedback loop not being closed: we get the feedback, but it is not often enough responded to, leaving the user to question if we ever got the feedback in the first place. Most often than not, it's received and saved, but the explicit practices how to close the feedback loop are not there. We need to work on this.

One of the ideas brought up was implemenging a true bug reporting system to Beta Labs. I've promised to look into this, and please share your comments. It's not a definite "yes" at this point, and I'll have to ask around for experiences from others about similar situations, but it is definitely a possibility for the future. The interesting aspect in a bug reporting system (or a bug tracker) was the better trackability of issues.

One other suggestion we got was to have regular status reports by the development teams. After discussing this with Tommi, we agreed to have a go at this. We don't know yet what the concept will be, but the goal is to start more systematically sharing any information we can about the progress of the application development.  The difficult thing here is going to be getting all the development teams onboard. But I'm confident we can greatly improve in this aspect.

-Ilkka