NokiaBetaLabs

Your voice on how well Beta Labs is doing - survey results

Some two weeks back, I asked you to fill out a survey. Almost 300 of you did, and I thank you all for doing so! For those interested,  here are the results (64kb PDF). The numbers speak for themselves: there are obviously aspects we could be doing better in, but overall the signal is quite positive.

Overview

Before analyzing the satisfaction results, I'd like to remind everybody what Nokia Beta Labs is about and the what the grand scheme of things is.

Beta Labs has become an important part of Nokia's trialling practices. We have a vast and enthusiastic community that is the invaluable life source of this activity. This means your well-being within the community is our concern, and hence the satisfaction measurements.

And as mentioned, we are overall doing quite well: the green bars thriumph the red ones easily. There is always room for improvement, but in general, the Beta Labs community is a happy one. But this doesn't mean we can just lay back comfortably and leave things as they are. Eventhough things are going well, we want to, and need to, contantly improve. Unsatisfied users are not users for long, which is why it is in our own interest to focus on really minimizing the sources of dissatisfaction.

The Beta Labs team naturally has only limited resources, which is why we need to constantly prioritize our work. These satisfaction surveys are an important tool for helping us do just that.

End of 2009

We asked you to fill the same survey in December 2009, and we used the results to prioritize our plans during this past spring 2010. Based on the survey, the main concerns we identified were ease of finding interesting and relative content, keeping up-to-date with Beta Labs and  Nokia employee participation. The concrete actions we took based on this included among others:

• Possibility to find content based on your device.
• First partner application: Microsoft Silverlight
• Making searching of feedback easier.
• Personal feed for replies.
• Email notifications on replies.
• Making unread feedback items more accessible.
• Forum shows Nokia responses more prominently. However, this is more of an internal topic for us and there has been a lot of internal work here, too, invisible to you.

Current situation

What has the impact been on the focus concerns?

• Keeping up-to-date with Beta Labs has improved significantly.
• Although many of you still feel Nokia employees could be contributing a lot more on the forums, the signifigance of this issue has decreased and it doesn't seem to cause as much frustration. This doesn't mean the task is done yet.
• We haven't been able to keep up with the demand for new content

We could go even more into details, but since it's all in the PDF file and because analyzing the data of all the questions is rather cumbersome I've done some statistical magic and simplified these questions into five underlying factors, resulting in the following chart:

Website functionality and low effort required to participate are the most satisfactory dimensions. The least impact on overall satisfaction (positive and negative) has been with interaction & feedback, including e.g. giving feedback, getting quick responses, troubleshooting and Nokia participation.

The 'intrinsic' factor includes such soft values as a feeling of having an impact, belonging to a valuable community, feeling your feedback is appreciated etc. While this factor causes considerate satisfaction to many, there are also those that feel differently.

Ultimately however, although content and value has the biggest positive impact, meaning it's the biggest reason you are satisfied, it is also the biggest source of frustration. Many of you are hungry for more interesting and valuable content. And despite how obvious this is, it's also one of the trickiest issues to solve. As most of you know, we in the Beta Labs team don't develop any product ourselves (except the website). In practice this means that while we can't affect the development or the amount of potential Beta Labs applications, we can help them take the last step of getting to beta.

Conclusions

To us it seems obvious that what we need to concentrate on next is figuring out how to increase the cool content in Beta Labs. As said, this isn't exactly a straight forward task and the amount of potential betas is determined by greater powers than us. Still, we aren't completely powerless in affecting our offering.