announcements  

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!

fixes  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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

📈  Improvements 📈 

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!

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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.

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞

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.

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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!

 new features  

✨ New Features ✨  

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.

improvements 

📈  Improvements 📈 

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!

fixes  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

Form Engine & Custom Surveys

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

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

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