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