NokiaBetaLabs

Beta Labs site update completed

The site maintenance break is now over and all content and functionality (including commenting and posting to the forums) should be restored.  Thanks for your patience!

You'll notice right away that there are some things that are presented differently, and some things are completely new.  While these changes might cause some anxiety at first, we hope that they'll make things easier, more efficient, or more useful in the long run.  Here's a rundown:

Following applications - NEW

In each application page you'll see button to "Add to my favorites".

Clicking that will give you easier access to the application from the main page and from your profile page.  The number of followers an app has also influences the "recent favorites" shown on the main page and the "popularity" column of the Applications catalog.  So following an application signifies that you feel it's worth your attention.

My Feed - NEW

My Feed (available when logged in) is a page that combines the latest activity from applications you follow as well as responses to posts you've made. 

Earlier we talked about two feeds: one for applications, one for responses to your threads.  Our plan is still to offer those, but that will take a bit more time to implement.  Sorry that we couldn't include that in today's update.

Feedback categorization - CHANGED

You'll note that the forum for each application is more tightly integrated to the application pages rather than being separate.  On top of that, the feedback is more clearly separated according to categories: discussion, suggestions, bug reports, and reviews.  We also have the ability to subcategorize bug reports and suggestions to make things easier for you and the development teams by adding a little structure.

Feedback ratings - NEW

Each post now has the option to rate it Helpful or Unhelpful.  This is a first step towards trying to weigh the value of feedback to help you and the development teams sort through the forum contributions.

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.

Editors' picks - NEW

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.

Filter by device - NOT YET

We still have our sights set on offering the option to filter our application catalog by the device(s) and desktop operating systems you use.  That needs a bit more work to implement in a convenient way.  In the meantime, you can filter the Applications catalog by platform.

Login to download - NEW

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 by editing your profile settings. Unfortunately, to be able to do this systematically while getting an accurate representation of the users, we will ask users to login before downloading betas.

Like with all the beta and experimental apps we host here, we expect some further development will be needed.  We invite you to look around, try things out, and let us know how we can serve you better.  Our forum is open for your feedback.

Thanks!