#Ted Communications

• Some duplication in listed Ted email blocking issues was corrected

#User Authentication & SSO

• Corrected issue preventing "Identity Provider (IdP) must supply this value" checkboxes in SAML configuration settings from functioning properly

‼ Scheduled Release Date: October 22, 2023 ‼

Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand… and so is the October release from Centercode, and believe me folks, this one is a Thriller (enjoy having that song stuck in your head!). Bring your biggest plastic pumpkin bucket—you’ll need it for all the treats we’ve got for you this month. Get a look at a whole host of new features and improvements that will give you a whole new login experience, as well as the full release of our Infographic dashboards!

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#New Login and Recruitment Experience

Our major focus this month is a series of new features and improvements all related to our login and recruitment experience, all designed to reduce friction and streamline the login experience to get those users engaged and testing!

#

#Keep the porch light on with Central Sign-in!

First up, we’ve got a great new way to ensure your testers are sure to find their way to your door with Centercode’s new Central Sign-in page. This handy new tool helps both you AND your testers navigate between different communities leveraging the Centercode Platform!

Navigating to https://signin.centercode.com (after Oct 22) will present your users with a list of every testing site that they have previously signed in to, with handy shortcut tiles to each one.

And for those concerned about test security, your site will only appear if you’ve opted your implementation into this feature, and all of the information displayed here is stored entirely client-side.

Whether you’re a project manager working across multiple implementations, or a particularly enthusiastic and prolific tester (or maybe both!), the Central Sign-in page will make tracking all your tests a breeze.

#Decorate your Centercode porch!

While not particularly spooky, would it really be Halloween season without doing a little decorating on your porch? We thought not—that’s why this batch of improvements focuses on the literal front door of your testing site: a brand new login and recruitment landing page experience!

You'll see a brand new sign-in interface, now located on the left side of the screen. This refreshed panel preserves the same functionality as the previous landing pages, but with a more compact and modern design that cleanly presents your site's SSO options!

#Give those Trick-or-Testers some options!

With all that new screen real estate to work with, we’ve also included some exciting additional community landing page functionality in our new testing opportunity cards! You can now add a link to your sign-in page that connects users with any community or project URL invitation you choose. It’s a fantastic way to get users into your open recruitment projects or to segment your users as they join the community via specific recruitments!

#A terrifyingly efficient new way to configure SSO!

We’ve already mentioned quite a few new SSO features and improvements, but the fun doesn’t stop there. We also put some work into creating a more elegant and consistent SSO login integration interface. We’ve streamlined, simplified, and cleaned up the pages and tools used to manage and create SSO sign-ins, as well as adding some new functionality to the existing pages.

We’ve reorganized the pages to improve navigation, and we've included new hover tips and clarifying the language to make setting up or managing this technical process more approachable to you and your IT department. We’ve also added functionality that gives you more control over user access with SSO, such the ability to add users who sign in through a given SSO to specific teams or lock users to signing in with one specific SSO configuration.

#A ghoulish new Google Auth option!

There’s no better way to get those Trick-or-Testers knocking at your door than to give them an easy way to enter your testing site. We're proud to introduce Centercode’s brand-new first class Google Auth SSO option! It removes the hassle of remembering display names and passwords—meaning more user engagement for your community and projects. It's a familiar and frictionless way for users to sign up or sign in to your site without sacrificing security.

This ready-out-of-the-box SSO option is available on all Centercode editions, and makes setting up one of the most widely used and recognized single sign-on options as easy as clicking a button! This will be enabled by default for our Beta, Delta, and Pro editions. Users of our Team and Legacy editions can simply navigate to your custom SSO page, select the new CentercodeGoogle option, enable it with a few clicks, and you’re good to go!

#A whole new way (not?) to invite the vampires in!

And finally, one last treat to top off your candy bucket: We’ve got a refresh of the Recruiting feature! All the functionality you're used to is still there, but you'll see we've simplified our vocabulary and made navigating the process more intuitive.

Centercode admins can invite users to project recruitments (formerly opportunities) with a variety of invitation types (formerly sources). For ease of use, these invitation types are categorized into open and targeted invitations, with descriptions that help you identify exactly how you're bringing participants into your community and projects!

Just be wary of inviting any particularly pale or pointy-toothed testers, unless you’ve got plenty of garlic on hand!

#User Summary mad science!

We took your feedback on our new User Summary interface, and with a little late-night mad science we think we’ve got all parts sewn together just the way you want!

One of the primary concerns we heard about the new User Summary was losing an easy one-click way to view and access a user’s various community and project level key data (surveys, test platforms, distributed values, agreements, etc.) The new “User data snapshot” located at the top of both community and project level user summary pages keeps that data front and center with buttons to take you right to what you need to see!

Another popular request was the ability to easily see which roles a user was in across a variety of projects without having to navigate to each project individually. To solve this issue we’ve added a new information card when mousing over individual projects in the user scorecard, allowing you to see this information as well as navigate to that project directly from the card!

In addition, we’ve made numerous smaller tweaks to the language and information displayed by some of the user engagement cards, as well as organizing the user journey information via relative date (with the full date available on hover.)

#Centercode GoEarly features

#Coming out of GoEarly: Test Infographic Dashboard

Our very first release tested with our new feature-flag customer testing model, the Test Infographic Dashboard, has been cooling on the windowsill after some extra bake time with our helpful and enthusiastic customer-testers—and now it is ready for everyone to enjoy! With both stakeholder and customer-friendly formats, these helpful new dashboards offer an easy way to share (or save for future presentation!) the results of all your testing efforts with the click of a button. Since it was our inaugural GoEarly feature flagged release, we provided a very thorough description in previous release notes. Get a full rundown here!

#Now in GoEarly: Enhanced Ted Customization

This month, we’re continuing our work on Enhanced Ted Customization. Our customer-testers have already provided a lot of insightful and actionable feedback, but we want to get these enhancements to Ted (and any future projects he helps you with) just right! If you haven’t already joined in, sign up—you'll get early access to the feature and see firsthand as your feedback shapes the future of Centercode!

This beta feature release allows you to choose how often Ted contacts your testers, as well as a new set of customizations, including his name, email signature, and custom avatars!

All paying customers interested in testing this new feature can sign up at any time—plus, you get to experience being a tester in a Centercode-managed test and a firsthand look at our best practices.

Sign up HERE if you’d like to participate!

#

#Integrations

• Project managers can now set up Slack integration within Feedback types without Community management access to the broader feature configurations.

#Miscellaneous

• API logs once again have their paging, allowing access to more than the latest entries.
• Corrected a Macro log date range filtering error that could occur under specific circumstances.

#Miscellaneous

• Corrected an issue related to downloading PDFs of signed user agreements for users who have been removed from the community

#Delta Dashboards

• Corrected an issue incorrectly displaying feedback filtering options on the infographic dashboard under specific configurations

#

#Gettin' Spooky!

• We have added some new spooky strings to our loading pages for some Halloween flair!

#Platform Security

• Addressed an SMS text verification security issue via mid-week hotpatches

It’s September, and that means sweater weather (participation may vary by location and climate), a non-stop flood of pumpkin spice products, and some brand-new updates and improvements from your friends here at Centercode. This month we’ve got some exciting new features, including a handy new dashboard UI feature AND a brand new (and much requested) beta feature we can’t wait for you to get your hands on!

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#Leaf behind unneeded tools and free up some screen space!

Centercode’s dashboards are a powerful, customizable way to present your project data, and we give you a lot of tools and options to present that data just the way you want. However, once you’ve got the filters set just right, wouldn’t it be nice to get a bit of that screen real estate back so you can bask in the full glory of all that data? Well, we’ve got you covered!

We’ve added a simple but very handy new button to the dashboard header toolbar that allows you to do just that. The “Collapsed header mode” button will collapse the header bar and hide everything but a lower profile version of the dashboard select drop-down, providing you a much cleaner view of the data that you’re there to see!

#Now entering beta: Enhanced Ted Customization

Hot on the heels of last month’s Test Infographic Dashboard beta feature, we’ve got the next beta feature release ready to go, and this is one a lot of you have been clamoring for: Enhanced Ted Customization! We’re keeping the description short and sweet (with maybe a hint of pumpkin spice) this month, but if you see anything you can’t wait to try, sign up and get early access to the feature, as well as the opportunity to provide your feedback and shape the future of Centercode!

Ted is a helpful guy, but we think he can be better! Faster! Stronger! Maybe a little less talkative! This month’s beta feature release allows you to choose how often Ted contacts your testers, as well as a new set of customizations, including his name, email signature, and custom avatars!

All paying customers interested in testing this new feature can sign up at any time—plus, you get the experience of being a tester in a Centercode-managed test and a first-hand view of our own best practices.

Sign up HERE if you’d like to participate!

#Data Engine & Custom Reports

• Survey export link into reporting will now generate API reports with a properly usable new key

#Data Engine & Custom Reports

• Corrections were made to feedback filters pertaining to distributed values and file download statuses

#Delta Dashboards

• A delta infographic dashboard display issue was fixed related to projects containing specific data configurations

#Miscellaneous

• Teams with specific user counts will no longer throw an error when adjusting team memberships

It’s time for our August release, and your ears don’t deceive you—that’s the Centercode Ice Cream (and Release) Truck rolling up the street with a cool new opportunity we can’t wait for you to try! We’re doing things a little differently this month in preparation for a whole new method of delivering Centercode content to you.

We’ve heard from you many times that you’d like to be able to get your hands on some of our upcoming features and improvements while they’re still in development, and this month we’re bringing you the opportunity to do just that!

#

#A hands-on sneak peek

As you might imagine, beta testing the beta testing platform has a very unique set of challenges. As such, we're always working to learn and improve, and with this month's Centercode release, we're taking a big step in evolving our own process by shifting to a feature-flag based testing model.

Moving forward, rather than features being introduced publicly solely through monthly updates, primarily to those with dedicated staging infrastructure, we'll be making key features available via a simple opt-in basis. This gives many more of our customers the opportunity to experience them and provide feedback than our prior early access program have done.

Note that we'll still be rolling out bug fixes and minor improvements both weekly and monthly, as well as new features that don't fit the feature-flag based approach - but whenever possible, we'll lean on this new model to ensure that we get the most feedback, resulting in the best release possible.

Given the transition to this new model, we won't be introducing major new production features in our August release. Rather, we're inviting customers to join our beta for our next major feature release. We intend to release this feature to production in September, resuming our monthly feature releases from that point.

#

#Now entering beta: Centercode Test Infographic

For our first beta feature release, we're excited to present our upcoming Test Infographic dashboard! This infographic comes in two primary variants.

The first offers a beautiful overview of your test results, including your team, feedback collated and acted on, and much much more. This is intended to be shared with internal audiences within your company, spreading awareness for your program and test results.

The second infographic offers a similar but more limited view, intended explicitly for a public audience of testers, recognizing and celebrating their efforts (excluding PII, of course) throughout your test.

Each infographic deeply showcases your branding and can cover an entire project or any fixed period you define. Given their motivational intent, our infographics focus exclusively on positive insights and outcomes, deliberately prioritizing inspiration over actionability, while also giving the ability to exclude any panel you wish.

All paying customers interested in testing this new feature can sign up at any time, which will also offer the experience of being a tester in a Centercode-managed test, providing a first-hand view of our own best practices.

Sign up HERE if you’d like to participate!

#Data Engine & Custom Reports

• Some tuning was done on the display of geographic style reports

#Performance & Tuning

• Performance was tuned on pages with extensive quick access lists

#Miscellaneous

• The "&" character in Feedback Type names will no longer break certain watch functionality

#User Summary

We've made numerous improvements and tweaks (both Centercode AND user sourced) to the new User Summary interface and experience including:

• References to agreements in the journey now link directly to the users' agreements
• Project links in the journey now link to the user's summary within those projects
• All links on the User journey now open in new tabs
• Cleaned up terminology used on the page to be more consistent
• Removed row hovers when User journey entry rows aren't actually interactable
• ...and a whole bunch more!

#Data Engine & Custom Reports

• Macro executions will no longer mix the resulting users based on the last-run team super-filter. In addition, we will once again retain the last user or feedback splash page super-filter selected for return visits
• Drilling down to feedback lists from custom report results will now include archived feedback by default
• Filtering by project features now works with multiple instances of the same filter criteria

#Platform Security

• Security was improved on the key entry page outside login

#Ted Communications

• Additional work behind-the-scenes to help ensure Ted email communication consistency

#User Interface & Experience

• The community level project list will now use more of the available whitespace for longer project names

#Miscellaneous

• Modifying display names will no longer require a password reset to log in

#User Interface & Experience

• User cards will now wrap better when containing many teams.

#Miscellaneous

• A correction was made to the triggering of email feedback comment messages under specific conditions.

#User Interface & Experience

• Corrected an issue causing a string to show improperly at the top of User Summary pages under certain conditions.

#Miscellaneous

• Fixed an issue preventing User Summary pages from loading pages if specific User Account Info fields were blank.
• Resolved issue causing low-byte characters in return bodies causing webhook macros to fail.

#User Interface & Experience

• Corrected an issue that would cause the right-hand menu in User Summary not to display properly under certain conditions.

#Miscellaneous

• Corrected an issue preventing email templates with file attachments from being sent via user macros.

It’s summer and that means BBQ season! July’s release contains a number of hot-off-the-grill updates to our User Summary interface, making it a one-stop shop for all your individual user management needs! In addition, we’ve also revamped and modernized many of the tools contained within the User Summary interface, adding to Centercode’s already formidable arsenal of intuitive and informative tester management options. So get those invites out to coworkers, stakeholders, and your targeted testing demographic (mostly them) and get cooking! And, as always, we’ve kept the (proverbial) bug-zapper at full power and eliminated a bevy of nasty bugs which we’ve listed below!

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#A User Summary summer(y)

The grilled-to-perfection meat (or your preferred veggie substitute) of this month’s release is a HUGE overhaul and modernization of our User Summary interface. We’ve refined both the form and functionality of our already powerful and convenient user summary pages into something really special, allowing you to view and manage nearly every aspect of a user’s profile from one convenient location.

#Manage everything, everywhere, all at once

The first (and one of the most convenient!) item on the menu of improvements is the standardization and streamlining of the User Summary interface between the community and project levels. You’ll be able to swap between a user’s community profile, as well as each of your projects that the user is a member of, from a single page via the convenient drop-down menu! The information and options available to you will swap on the fly based on the scope and project you’ve selected. This makes managing and tracking user activity across multiple projects a snap!

The summary pages on both scopes contain a list of user actions and data that, like a good potato salad, are both hearty and digestible. It's similar to the feedback ticket view you're familiar with: actions are on the left, while a summary is on the right. In the middle, you've got tons of detail about the user's activity that you can filter and manipulate with a few clicks.

#One view to rule them all

The next major improvement to the User Summary interface comes in the form of the new User Journey tool. User journey tracks and displays a huge amount of data about events and activities performed by (or on) your users. Even better, the presentation of this information is now standardized across the community and project scopes. The same community/project selection drop-down menu that lets you switch between scopes also gives you access to the information presented by the User journey, swapping dynamically based on the scope you're viewing. Finally, a series of clickable cards above the User journey will allow you to filter for the exact data you’re looking for, also updating dynamically based on your scope and the time period filter selected.

#What’s the score?

For dessert, we'd like to highlight the brand new User scorecard, which you'll see in the right-hand menu on both the community and project scopes. The User scorecard displays the Tester Impact™ score—a value automatically calculated by Centercode based on a tester’s level of engagement with impactful feedback (via submitting, voting, and replying to feedback within projects). It also shows user points, which you and other admins can grant via custom events (formerly known as rankings). Showcasing both a community score and the five most recently accessed projects (which can be expanded to show all), the User scorecard makes it easier than ever to identify and fully utilize your most dedicated testers!

#All that and a bag of (BBQ-flavored) potato chips

These are just a few of the many features and improvements you’ll see in the new and improved User Summary update! We can’t wait for you to get in there and see all the ways this new tool will streamline YOUR tests. We’re pretty proud of this one, and we’d love to hear your feedback, so contact us at support@centercode.com to let us know what you think.

#E-merge victorious

Next up, we’ve got a visual refresh for our Merge User Accounts tool. The Merge User Accounts tool received a bit of visual polish to bring it in line with the more modern look of the platform, and we’ve tweaked the data displayed about the user accounts you're merging to more accurately reflect the data community managers are concerned about when merging accounts.

#What’s in a (full)name? You choose!

And last, but definitely not least, we’ve added the ability to create a PII-safe version of the full name displayed within your projects. Complete instructions are available on our Knowledge Base, and feel free to reach out to our support team if we can help!

#Copy updates

#The (user) event of the season

If you've been with Centercode for a while, you may have seen one (or a few) of the different ways we've referred to user scoring over the years. Its purpose has always been the same: helping you identify the superstar testers you want on future tests while calling out the ones you don't. But over time and dozens of releases, the names of these useful tools got muddied, making it hard to know what's what.

You spoke up about the confusion—and we listened. To complement our refresh of the User Summary interface, we've refreshed our user score language, cleaning out all the outdated vocabulary and inserting our new, more intuitive terminology that'll help our admins (that's you!) use these scores to their full benefit.

• Tester Impact™ (formerly known as impact score, participation score, and collaboration score) tallies the impact of a tester's participation within a single project. Like the Impact Score™ attached to each piece of feedback, Tester Impact™ is calculated automatically by Centercode. It's based on a tester's submissions, votes, replies, and other in-project interactions; a high score means a tester has submitted high-impact feedback, is actively participating, or both.
• Total Tester Impact™ is the combined total of a user's Tester Impact™ scores across all their previous and current projects.
• Custom user events(formerly known as rankings) are admin-created tags you can pin to a user's profile to record info about them for future reference. You can stick a custom user event to a profile at the community or project scopes, either as a note, positive or negative points, or a points/note combo.
  • To create a custom user event, click the Community drop-down menu > Community settings > Custom user events.
• Notes are comments about a user you can pin to a user's profile at either a community or project scope. You can write a note individually or use a custom user event.
• Project points are the points given or taken away from a project user via custom user events. They're completely separate from a user's Tester Impact™ score—for example, you might create a custom user event called "Detailed feedback" to identify and/or assign project points to testers who leave very detailed responses, regardless of its measurable impact on your test.
• Community points work just like project points but on (surprise!) the community scope. These are useful for tracking general community engagement—for example, you might create a custom event that gives a few community points to users every time they log in. You could then combine it with a macro to award those points automatically.

Finally, it's worth noting that all of these scores, points, and events are completely hidden from testers—although they could be shown via dynamic tags if you had a creative need for it! Hopefully, this inspires you to check out the User scorecard sidebar in the improved User Summary interface and to create your own custom user events!

#Ted Communications

• Refinements were made to some behind-the-scenes Ted email processing functionality

#User Authentication & SSO

• Mobile verification number generation was made to be more randomized than prior

#Form Engine & Custom Surveys

• Admin form functions within the community user summary have been extended into projects

#User Interface & Experience

• Adjustments were made to the display of certain custom project menu links

#Miscellaneous

• Corrected an issue with agreement file generation for usernames containing certain special characters

#Project Templates & Cloning

• User Referral and Community Team sources will once again clone over from the template project

#Miscellaneous

• Printing feedback tickets to PDF has improved formatting and no longer has a Feedback ID header on each page
• Email log filter will once again allow you to enter text for filter criteria

#Form Engine & Custom Surveys

• Surveys set as a notice for a future date or already expired will no longer prompt users with the survey

#User Interface & Experience

• Adjustments were made to the highlight of certain buttons that shared a color with their backgrounds under our new branding configurations

#Miscellaneous

• User email containing files sent as user actions or from the user summary will once again send as intended