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

✨ New Features ✨ 

Getting dressed up for the holidays!

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!

💡 Centercode GoEarly features 💡 

Next up in GoEarly: Media in Content and Feedback

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 

We've got something very special coming soon…

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  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

User Authentication & SSO

• Single Sign-on was adjusted to allow use of its associated Recruitment even under closed community local login configurations

Miscellaneous

• Resolved a timing issue involving scheduled user and feedback macros, which could lead to disorganized emails and included dynamic tags

‼ 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!

✨ 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!

improvements

📈  Improvements 📈 

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!

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!

✨ New Features ✨  

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!

💡 Centercode Beta Feature 💡 

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!

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

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

Our June release is anything but gloomy! We’ve got some sunny new upgrades to our visual theme editor that make branding your Centercode as cool and easy as a summer breeze. And, as always, we've swatted several pesky bugs throughout the month, which are listed below.

improvements

📈  Improvements 📈 

Islands-in-the-streamlined visual themes!

Nothing sets the stage for Official User Testing Business™ like a beautiful, well-branded site. Giving your community and projects a polished and professional look makes testers feel like they're part of your team, which revs their excitement and actually increases participation. That's why, for our June update, we've reorganized and streamlined the Visual Theme tool to make creating and modifying visual themes easier than ever!

This update makes choosing your colors (and knowing where and how they'll appear on your site) a much more intuitive experience. We’ve reduced the number of selections you’ll have to make when creating a theme. Before, many options required manual color selection. Now, certain elements, like menu text, drop-down/fly-out menu backgrounds, and table headers, are determined automagically based on your menu bar color selection, so you can build a cohesive and readable theme in seconds!

Additionally, we’ve added the ability to adjust and review your page background images and text color selections in real time, just make your changes and they’ll appear instantly on the visual theme page! (No more applying the theme to your live site to see the results 🎉) This also extends to the backgrounds for your site and landing pages. Simply select a background tint or image, and it will immediately apply to the preview window, making selecting appropriate text and link colors a breeze. Finally, you'll notice we've added several pre-loaded (and Centercode recommended!) background images. Definitely try them out—these backgrounds (handpicked by Luke 😀) will make your visual theme pop!

NOTE: While we have automated certain color selections that used to be available, you can still adjust these colors manually via custom CSS.

Get creative!

We’ve made a few small but impactful changes to our content and release management menus that make adding new resources as easy as pressing a (much easier to find!) button. The new “Add content” and “Add release” buttons located at the top of their respective management screens take you straight to the resource creation screens, where you can jump straight into creating your new masterpiece! And in case you preferred the previous method, hovering over a content or release type will still show you the “New content/release” button that you know and love.

fixes  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

Miscellaneous

• Email external destinations for tickets containing file attachments will once again send as expected

It’s May, and that means it is time for another May-jorly exciting Centercode release (and a WHOLE lot of May puns, so buckle in)! We’ve got a couple big, new integrations features that May just blow your socks clean off, as well as some improvements to Ted’s admin-facing communications. And, as always, check out the list of bug fixes we've deployed throughout the month!

 new features

✨ New Features ✨  

Center yourself

First up, we’re proud to introduce the Centercode Integration Center, a brand new tool to help you May-nage all of your various Centercode integrations! Our first class and API-based integrations are powerful tools that help push your testing to the next level, and we want to make accessing, managing, and learning about those tools as easy as possible. 

This new menu (located in your Community configuration sub-menu) contains tiles that link to a variety of Centercode’s first-class integrations (like Jira and Slack), as well as step-by-step guides to some of our more popular API-based integrations (Figma, YouTube, etc). While this menu already contains an impressive list of options, there are more to come!  We want to hear from you about what you’d like to see, so don’t hesitate to use the “Suggest an integration!” link to let us know what YOU would like to see added to this list.

We haven’t been slacking (but now you can!)

May-ke way for a brand new first-class Centercode integration: Slack! What better way to celebrate the introduction of the Centercode Integration Center than with a useful new tool to access through it? This handy new integration allows you to easily stay on top of incoming feedback by having Centercode send a Slack message whenever a new piece of feedback is created. You'll get a brief description of the new feedback submission, as well as a direct link for one-click access.

Setting up is simple—once you connect your existing Slack implementation to the site, you can configure which feedback types to send, and to which Slack channel you’d like to receive these updates. Maybe you want feedback submission across all your projects to feed into a single channel. Or maybe you'd rather split your feedback types into their own designated channels. Either way, you have a new tool in your toolbox that lets you choose what works best for your team and makes tracking feedback submissions in real time easier than ever.

improvements

📈  Improvements 📈 

Ted talk

We’ve been doing a little May-aintenance (last one, I promise) on everyone’s favorite testing assistant, Ted! While Ted’s daily scrum emails are already packed with useful data, we added one very basic but important bit of info: how many pieces of feedback were submitted during the period the email pertains to (daily, phase, or project closure). Additionally, Ted’s emails to testers will now always include the project name in the subject line, to avoid confusion for testers who may be in multiple projects!

fixes  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

Ted Communications

• Activity order within the site will now dictate the order presented in Ted email participant feature updates

User Interface & Experience

• Title messaging adjusted for clarity on the blocking issue sub-dashboards

Spring has officially sprung, and Centercode’s garden is positively blooming with a fresh batch of new features and improvements. And boy, do we have some exciting ones for you this month, folks! We’ve got some powerful new tools and a few convenient enhancements to our existing interface, all designed to make triaging your feedback faster and easier than ever before. And, as always, check out the list of bug fixes we've deployed throughout the month!

new features 

✨ New Features ✨  

Converting your wishes into reality

Drumroll, please! We’re proud to introduce our brand new first-class Feedback Type Conversion tool! The ability to easily convert one feedback type to another is one of our longest-standing and most requested features, and we think this new tool really knocks it out of the park! This simple but powerful tool allows you to move feedback from one type to another with a single click (and confirmation)! 

Designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind, the feedback type conversion tool will bring over all of your critical ticket data without the need for any manual field mapping. Any fields not converted automatically will be stored in the ticket history, so no information will ever be lost. Additionally, the system will automatically notify the ticket submitter, letting them know their feedback has been converted to a new type so they can keep track of it. You’ll find these new options located in the right-hand menu, just below your macro list when viewing a ticket. It's also available in the new Quick Feedback Update tool, which we'll explain in the section below. 

This one has been on a lot of your wishlists, and it took a lot of hard work and planning to get it where we wanted in terms of flexibility and ease of use. Once you’ve had a chance to get your hands on it, we’d love to hear what you think!

It’s all in the cards!

We’ve been making a lot of tweaks to the information presented in feedback cards, which you see when viewing your feedback in dashboards or the feedback simple list. You’ve let us know (emphatically!) that these two methods of reviewing feedback are an integral part of your daily workflows. This time, we’ve got one we really think you’re going to love: the Quick Feedback Update tool, which gives you the ability to take all kinds of actions on a ticket right from the feedback simple list or dashboard!

To access this new functionality, simply open the expanded view of any feedback ticket card, and click the new Quick update hyperlink. This link will present you with a drop-down list of a huge variety of actions, including status updates, macros, and even the new feedback conversion tool mentioned above! You'll also be able to quickly reply to a ticket from the card itself (both as a single action or in addition to one of the previously mentioned actions). We love giving you solutions that increase functionality and reduce friction at the same time!

Note: Having full access to the new quick update menu requires having full access to the ticket itself. This means that you'll only see the full list of actions if you already have the ticket checked out. However, keep reading to learn about another awesome new feature developed in tandem with quick update that will really unlock the full power of this tool!

improvements 

📈  Improvements 📈

Check this out (or not!)

Sticking with the trend of streamlining the feedback triage process, we’ve got an (optional!) simplification that removes the need to take ownership of (or “check out”) a ticket before making edits. We’ve added an ownership section to the top of the Feedback collaboration settings menu within each feedback type, which contains the new checkbox “Require team members to check out feedback in order to modify”. Leaving this box unchecked means that any user who is a member of the feedback owner team can make edits at will, without taking direct ownership of the ticket!

Note: All existing feedback types will automatically have access to this new functionality! If you would like your existing projects/feedback types to function the same as before where checking out/owning the feedback is REQUIRED to make edits to a ticket you will need to enable the “Require team members to check out feedback in order to modify” checkbox in the feedback collaboration settings for each of your existing feedback types.

A link is worth a thousand words

Next on the list, we’ve got a new addition to our feedback reply toolbar that makes locating and sharing user replies easier than ever before! The new "Copy link" button allows you to create a link directly to a piece of feedback that will highlight and automatically scroll to the linked reply (as well as load the appropriate page of replies, if applicable). Whether you’re directing your triage teams’ attention to a specific reply, or requesting an update from a user regarding a previous reply, this new button will make pointing users right where they need to go a snap!

Making new like new again

And finally, we’ve got another addition to the ongoing list of feedback simple list tweaks and improvements. This time, we’ve added a bit of interactive functionality to the “New” indicator icon, allowing you to dismiss it without manually viewing the associated ticket. This change additionally allows you to re-mark a ticket as new if you’d like to remind yourself to check in on it later. This simple but impactful change gives you a lot more control over which pieces of feedback you’d like to keep a closer eye on, all without navigating out of the feedback simple list!

📝   Hope strings eternal: April's copy updates 📝  

All cased down and ready to roll

We've updated the platform to use sentence case for all of our text! Instead of seeing a mix of title case, sentence case, and ALL CAPS, this change displays text in a way that's consistent, scannable, and easier on the eyes.

Unlike title case, which has many different capitalization rules and variations, sentence case is simple and intuitive: the first letter of the first word is capitalized, while the rest of the words (except for proper nouns and acronyms) are lowercase. Because it resembles the way we write, sentence case is more natural to read and scan in English, making it easier to retain information. The uniformity of lowercase letters also reduces visual clutter, which improves navigation and helps important info stand out.

While the change might take some getting used to (especially if you've been with Centercode for a long time), we hope it makes communication in Centercode more effective for you, your teams, and your testers!

Title fields are string-loaded for sentence case

Connected to the sentence case update, we've added a nifty little feature that makes sentence casing feedback summaries and other title fields refreshingly simple. The Case Tool button appears on the right edge of a title or name field when it detects a capitalized word in the middle of a phrase. Clicking this button automatically sentence cases the text inside—meaning you no longer need to install a Chrome extension or wear out your eyes manually casing word after word. In addition to recognizing ALL CAPS as acronyms, it recognizes your company name, community name, and project name as proper nouns and keeps them appropriately capitalized.

fixes  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

Feedback Management

• The duplicate search interface will no longer prevent functionality for results searched for after initially loading on the default list

User Interface & Experience

• Professional edition now has the ability for feedback roles to be adjusted per feedback type
• A specific project string containing a single quote when translated will no longer interfere with the loading of the visual editor

March comes in like a lion, and so does Centercode! We’ve got a fresh round of improvements that we just couldn’t wait to get out to you, so they're roaring in a few days early. The March release includes a bevy of UI fixes, tweaks, and improvements that are guaranteed to get your month started off right. And, as always, check out the list of bug fixes we've deployed throughout the month.

improvements

📈  Improvements 📈 

Replying in style

First up, we've made some BIG improvements to the Feedback Reply UI! Replies and comments in Feedback Management will work exactly the way you’re used to (none of the functionality has changed), but we’ve upgraded to a cleaner, more readable, and more modern-looking interface.

The first change you’ll notice is that the entire reply interface now sits in a single contiguous window. Second, when you hover over a post, you'll see your admin edit tools more readily. Finally, we’ve switched the staff and important reply indicators from colored borders to a clearer, easier-to-notice tag system (which will allow us to add additional tags in future releases!). 

A new spring look for duplicates

Next in line are some improvements to our Feedback Duplicate and Predictive Match interface. Like the Feedback Reply UI, we've switched the Duplicate Feedback and Predictive Match interface to a single clean and contiguous window (#twinsies). The adjusted button width ensures your ticket information on the left side of the bar won't get covered. We've finished it off with visual polish here and there, including updated colors, icons, and brand new tooltips for each icon.

Supporting our Support menu

After years of supporting our customers, the Support Menu is getting some support of its own. We’ve added more helpful links and resources than you can shake a stick at! In the new Documentation and Testing Resources flyout menus, we’ve reorganized existing links and added a huge array of helpful resources, like our always-useful knowledge base articles, blogs, webinars, and guides. For members of the parasocial network, you'll also find links to our social media channels, so it's even easier to stay current with all the new content and resources we’re putting out! Lastly, the Subscription Dashboard link has moved from the Support menu to the User menu—a better fit for its role in your platform's functionality.

Keeping it simple

The Simple List is a key part of the feedback triage process. To make sure it presents the most important information in a concise and readable format (i.e., keeping it simple), we've tweaked the format to bring the ticket's Feature information into clearer focus. To accommodate this update, phase info has moved to a hover-over pop-up, so its easily accessible even with feature info in the spotlight.

Consolidated resource scheduling

Next up, we've streamlined resource scheduling by consolidating set dates and availability periods into a single, uniform tool. Before now, there were two different methods for scheduling resources in the platform: you had to choose specific start/end dates for some and set an availability period for others. We've decreased friction by combining these two methods and making that change consistent across all types of resources.

To schedule a resource for future publication or set an availability period, enable the Limit availability to a schedule checkbox. This option lets you set a publish date and, if applicable, choose how long it will remain available once published. Expired content will be archived automatically to keep your resource management workspaces cleaner.

A word of note: All existing customer resources will be updated to this new style. Any expired resources will be sent to your Archive automatically. The system will update any active resources that expire in less than 30 days so they'll deactivate right on time. Resources with expiration dates that are more than 30 days out have been set to "N/A" and should be checked manually.

A note about notifying

Publishing resources is that much more convenient now, thanks to a small but meaningful interface update! When you're publishing any resource (content, surveys, releases, etc), you'll have the option to Publish and Notify. you’ll have the option to “Publish and Notify”. Previously, these were two separate actions: you had to publish a resource, then manually select the Notify tool. This new option streamlines that flow, allowing you to immediately publish a resource and trigger the notify tool with no extra navigation required! 

To complement this change, we’ve cleaned up and consolidated the various page headings on the publish page into a single uniform infobox. Letting your testers know about the new resources you’ve created for them is now easier than ever!

The magical art of tidying up

And last on the list, we’re getting a head start on our spring cleaning by tidying up various UI elements all across the site. We’ve corrected text spacing and button transparency issues on many different pages and made slight adjustments to default feedback type colors. In addition, we’ve slightly increased the font size on some of our smallest text items throughout the site. This ensures they conform to accessibility font contrast standards no matter which colors your visual themes use. You may not notice these small changes, but you can trust that, like being in a clean house, it just feels better.

fixes  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

User Interface & Experience

• The font size used for navigation trails was increased slightly to conform to maintain accessibility standards

It’s February, and love is in the air! In this month’s Centercode release, we’re bringing you a heart-shaped box of bite-sized new features and improvements. Follow the trail of release note rose petals to learn about each of these exciting new Centercode additions! And, as always, check out the list of bug fixes we've deployed throughout the month.

improvements 

📈  Improvements 📈 

A Return to Form

The first arrow in Cupid’s release note quiver is a slight adjustment to last month’s community project list UI update. By popular demand program groups are returning to the Community Home project list!  We always love hearing from you what works and what doesn’t, and you let us know that program grouping was an essential way of managing large project lists. So, without further ado, we present the (new) new Community Home project list!

Quicker Quick Invites

Invite users into your community or projects (and possibly your heart?) faster than ever before with this handy new addition to the menu bar! This button keeps the ability to add users to your project or community front and center (well, slightly to the right) at all times. Additionally, we’ve given the Quick Invite menu a little polish to bring it in line with last month’s big UI update. Now get out there and get inviting!

Searching for Knowledge in all the Right Places

Centercode's search tool is getting a little love. Previously known as the “Knowledge Base,” we’ve given this handy tool a new name (now simply “Search”) and a makeover. Along with the name change, we’ve also updated (and added a more visible button) to the Search Reference Guide, which details precisely how to target the data you’re looking for!

Simpler Simple Lists

Last but not least, a quick update to the look of the Simple List feedback view. The intent of the Simple List is to present users with a succinct, at-a-glance summary of feedback tickets. But this view looked busier than we wanted it to, especially with the color-coded status tags. These tags will remain in the more information heavy feedback view types, such as the dashboard view. We stripped those tags out of Simple Lists(while maintaining the ability to filter the list by status if that is your intended purpose) to keep things readable and easy to navigate!

✏️ Let's Talk About Text: February's Copy Updates ✏️

A Rose by Any Other Display Name

Usernames are taking a new name: display names. As an admin, nothing's changed—you'll still have access to the full names of your members. 

What's in a name, you ask? The switch gives you more flexibility to manage your testers' privacy without sacrificing the security of having identifying info on file. The new label makes it clear to your users when completing this field that this may be shown to other participants, which is still something you have control over in your Project Settings.

More (Love) Language Updates

Communication is key to a successful relationship, so we focused on increasing clarity within your platform experience. Page titles and error messages are now more consistent. Blank states are also getting some much-needed love and showing off a little more personality. We hope these updates, while subtle, will win your heart.

fixes  

🐞  Bug Fixes 🐞 

Community & Project Homes

• Corrected an issue with Community Home listing Project Sources more than once under certain conditions

Localization & Strings

• Assuming a User will now show their expected Feedback Types instead of the assuming users on the Project Homepage & Dashboards.

Platform Security

• Addressed a security issue with files
• Addressed a password related validation issue

User Interface & Experience

• Assuming a User will now show their expected Feedback Types instead of the assuming users on the Project Home & Dashboards

Miscellaneous

• Stricter validation was implemented when creating a sub-domain within Signup
• More adjustments were made to file security behind-the-scenes to ensure Signup email files load correctly