Can you smell that? That’s right—a piping hot plate of new features for Ted! After cooking with our GoEarly testers, we're ready to serve up Ted customization features. But that's not the only thing we're whipping up at Centercode: an absolute smorgasbord of enhancements are headed your way next month. Here's a taste of what is in store! 🦃
new features
This month’s main course is one you’ve all been craving: enhanced customization options for everyone’s favorite tester engagement bot, Ted! We’ve added the ability to give Ted a new look, as well as customize his name, email address, and email signature.
And the new options for Ted don’t stop there! We’ve also added some useful new customization options for the frequency of Ted’s smart engagement emails, giving you more freedom to decide when and how Ted reaches out to your testers. Read here for more detail on what each of these settings mean.
Now get Ted looking just the way you like, and get testing!
We’ve got another exciting GoEarly project on the horizon, this one involving some awesome new media features and functionality! These features will let you record different types of media, including video (camera), audio, and screen. We're starting with a research phase to learn more about how you'd use features like this, and we’d love to hear your opinions. Sign up and see firsthand as your feedback shapes the future of Centercode!
announcements
Finally, if November is all about thanks, December is all about giving! We're excited to announce we have something very special planned for next month. No spoilers yet - just know this huge batch of updates is designed to let our customers know just how much we appreciate them. You're going to love what we've got in store, so stay tuned.
fixes
‼ 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!
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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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!
improvements
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.)
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!
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!