We released our public beta at the beginning of July and instantly had some downloads and great feedback coming in. Most of the respondents think Lifeblog is great. About 80% of them would recommend it to a friend (can’t please all, that’s not our intent, since we do have a target user group we are trying to please). About half the respondents even had a Nokia 7610, so they are real users.
What is great about a public beta round is that you get direct response from folks who haven’t spent months with the development version of the product or who work in the company and are familiar with it. Nonetheless, those who usually download betas are adventurous and demanding. So, we took to heart the likes and dislikes.
We braced ourselves for what the folks would dislike the most. We had some things that we’d thought folks wouldn’t like. The responses were in some ways expected, but the order was not.
The most disliked feature was that all the new items are deleted from the phone when transferred to the PC. We hear ya. We’re thinking of ways to improve that experience, since the idea behind it is to clear up space on the phone. But some folks have mentioned that they would like to keep their SMSs at least a bit longer. What I usually do is move stuff to the favorites (there’s many ways to do it).
Other things that were not popular were related to the PC, such as graphics requirements, file locations, connectivity issues (more on that some other day), and windowing.
Overall, we were pleased with the comments and think we’ve done a good job with our first version.
Along with defect reports, we also got some good proposals, some of which we are already planning on implementing in upcoming versions of Lifeblog, such as proper blogging, back-up, more languages, batch editing, more keyboard shortcuts, more options on the phone, and more phones (more on that some other day).
Other areas we are looking into that beta users also proposed – such as printing, slideshow, windowing, and more content types – we want to add when the user experience is right, not just rush to add a feature.
If you have more comments, feel free to leave a comment here, or better, visit our feedback pages <click here> to get the feedback directly to our development team.
Thanks to all who have responded with feedback so far!
