The reincarnation of www.symbian.org is the most obvious product of the sedulous industry that has occurred during recent months to sculpt Symbian’s web presence.
www.symbian.org can now begin to serve as the hub for the community that is amassing around Symbian. A hub that inter-twines the selection of websites that we have created, customized or are present on in order to support, communicate and take direction from everyone (from developers to consumers) who wants to be part of the future of mobile.
In briefish summary:
- www.symbian.org is the hub that presents what Symbian means in terms of the features, devices, applications and experiences the operating system makes possible. The site also provides a window onto the conversations that are taking place around and about Symbian. Plus, does all those standard things that an organisation’s website should: membership information (have you joined yet?), event and news updates, and whole raft of detail about what and why we are.
- Then we’ve got developer.symbian.org, where code contributors and app developers congregate to do what they do best.
- And for those who have great ideas for what the mobile devices and applications of the future should be (or, want to tell Symbian how we could be functioning), there’s ideas.symbian.org. Propose your idea, and vote and comment on other people’s ideas. Those ideas that the community likes best will become reality.
- Horizon is an application directory and publishing program. I’m not going to say too much about this as it will be the subject of further announcements.
- In addition to the above, there’s a new Japanese homepage for our developer website (to complement the ever-growing set of Japanese content within the wiki) and we’re working on a Chinese homepage to perform the same function. Here’s a link to the Chinese wiki in the meantime.
And, of course, Symbian staff are present and proactive on StackOverflow, GetSatisfaction, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, the ubiquitous Twitter and anywhere else the community wants us to be (tell us where you want us via ideas.symbian.org)
If you want to influence future website improvements there are a number of ways:
- You can propose ideas for what we should do next, and how we should improve what already exists
- You can report and monitor bugs against any of our websites
- Monitor and comment on what we’re working on, via the Product Management blog
- When you exhaust of Jimmy Wales’ insights, talk to us at SEE09
First comments:
1) Lots of flash (anyone running FlashBlock sees nothing)
2) Lack of clarity on who you’re appealing to
3) Most significant content off the bottom of the screen (I only found the links by accident)
4) Link to Developer site (core of Symbian’s existence) is 10th URL down (bottom in the list) in the main section and in significantly smaller type than the first four
5) Apps -> Find New Apps doesn’t actually take you to a place where you can download apps such as Ovi Store (which is what most people would be expecting)
6) No clear metrics on the front page to measure Symbian’s success
Interested in the statement “we’re a community, not a company” statement on the front page. I would be very interested to know how many current Symbian OS developers (mostly within Nokia) were involved in the review period of thew new site.
Hi David,
Thanks for your comments.
(1) Yes – anyone who turns off Flash wont see the Flashy effects. But we’re hoping they embellish rather than constitute the site.
(2) We didn’t want to spell out who we’re appealling to on the homepage but we are hoping that the people we’re appealling to will be appealled to without being too explicit, and that anyone who owns or is interested in owning a Symbian device, or wants to know the features and experiences available on Symbian devices, will find the site interesting. Plus, we’ve got coverage of member, news and general corporate information.
(3) I assume this means ’significant to you’. And most users are familiar with scrolling down nowadays.
(4) Anyone can be part of our community, via this site, via ideas.symbian.org and via developer. Developer is well known and is readily accessible through the our sites icon at the top of the page.
(5) “Find new apps” will take you to the new Symbian Horizon app directory when it launches tomorrow
(6) No clear metrics? We have lots of measures that we’re using internally.
(7) We didn’t involve anyone from Nokia in the actual site design, though obviously we used all of the community managers as sounding boards for the site, and consulted our internal developers (who are very enthused by the new look). And you’ll be pleased to hear, we’re now opening up one of our internal update and feedback channels via http://hereswhatweredoing.wordpress.com/
Are there larger banner images on any site on the Interwebs? Seems a waste of screen real estate.
Also the only way to make the dire developer forums readable ‘read latest post’ iirc seems to have disappeared.
I agree with David. It’s very hard to find links to developer.symbian.org and ideas. symbian.org (e.g. try serch for develop(er) key word on main site).
Because these two sites are essential for someone who want to contribute links to them should be visible… I haven’t spotted this ‘Our sites’ drop down box at all – font is too small.
I think It would be very useful to have ‘How to contribute’ item in main menu.
Very creative web design, but i think if you replace flash elements of static pictures it was more versatile and considered.
It’s okay that other pages haven’t the flash.
Excuse me for my bad knowledge in English.)
Fantastic job!! I really like the use of the Symbian-specific graphics. Congratulations to your artist(s).
Regarding the Flash elements, let me tell you something. If you have been watching the platform evolution lately you might have noticed the extreme interest by Adobe to provide Flash for mobile devices.
This is a PERFECT opportunity for Symbian to showcase its products/services using Flash since most future devices will be able to see the Flash contents as if it were desktop (ok, with an extremely small screen estate). Let me remimd you that the iPhone can’t see Flash, so it’s a very nice plus to have here. Instead, our mobile devices can read Flash so no problem having it!
Unless you don’t like Flash for some [ideological] reason…
I think some of David’s comments are spot on and I agree with Anton and Kensai – we invested in original graphics, took a chance and they look great.
There’s a question underlying this – do we become ultra-consultative so every step we take we consult first. In some respects that’s an approach I really like. But we clearly don’t have the capacity to do that and we want to make decisions that don’t necessarily make everyone happy. If did that it would be very dull.
However, I think one of the braver things that’s being said around Symbian right now is our brand is our community so it is going to be interesting to see where our brand identity goes to from here.
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Hi Rz,
The approach we took with linking to developer and ideas was as follows:
- making them readily accessible via the site header
- link to them from the front page, but do not over-emphasise them because linking to them is not the primary purpose of this page
- insert links to them in the right-hand column of any page where there could be any association with ideas or developer (for example, if you look at any features page there’s a link to ideas; if you look at the apps page there are links to developer and horizon).
So that you know the model we applied: we tried very consciously to follow the use case of someone visiting the site and making associations according to the content they visited (rather than the use case of someone coming to the site and looking for links to developer/ideas). We probably need to spend time considering each page and adding further links (the RH column is customisable) as appropriate on particular pages. Any suggestions of links that you believe would be useful on particular pages would be gratefully received.
Thanks,
Freddie
It’s important to recognize that this new “flashy” Symbian website is targetted towards consumers, not developers (although of course developers are usually consumers too). Interestingly in the best keynote at SEE, Geoff Moore specifically said that Symbian should not try to build a relationship with the consumer.
Will we listen to one of the top consultants in the world?
Hi Mark,
I think Geoff Moore’s comments were very interesting, and there should be due consideration within and around Symbian about the level of attention we devote to various groups.
One thing I believe should be considered is this: there’s a difference between actively reaching out to a specific audience and not turning them away if they happen to pass by.
By this I mean, Symbian has resources for developers and actively seeks to attract them to our platform via events, literature and campaigns.
For general users we do not have such outreach activities, however, it seems that they do seek out Symbian in their hundreds of thousands every month (and these certainly aren’t all visitors looking for the developer website) and for them we now have a website which is hopefully interesting, informative and inviting about what Symbian is and does. Does this constitute building a relationship, should we be directing them elsewhere?
– Freddie
Hi Freddie,
It’s the start of building a relationship – it depends what you follow it up with. You already know my opinion on consumer-friendly changes to ideas.
My understanding is that the vast numbers of consumers out there looking for Symbian are generally people who have purchased a Symbian device, can’t find the support they need from the manufacturer, discover somewhere on the web that it is running Symbian under the hood and try that avenue.
Absolutely there should be something they can find easily that directs them to the relevant OEMs resources for this purpose (in my experience with these questions they tend to be OEM or device specific rather than generic to the platform) .
Of course it isn’t inherently a bad thing to provide more information for consumers, it’s about allocation of resources and that’s exactly what Geoff Moore was talking about. When you start providing info, where does it stop? We have a Get Satisfaction site for consumer queries – by having an official one, we take some responsibility for the questions getting answered, even if we’re trying to rally the community to do that.
I believe Geoff is right, it’s the OEMs that need to have the consumer relationships and I expect that they agree – the customer relationship is very important to them. If they wanted us to provide their customer support channel (or fill the cracks in theirs) then they should probably communicate that through the board and fund us appropriately to do it properly.
Of course most products and technologies have multiple consumer communities around them these days, but they’re typically run by the community, for the community. Symbian have several, all of the most popular of which turn up in the first page of a Google search for “Symbian” – I note that we don’t link to any of them from our front page.
I think a fantastic job has been done on the new website design and interaction (although I’m in the anti-flash crowd, but I realise that’s a fairly minority opinion). I just disagree with its original goals and the need for us to host all of the content that has been created and or aggregated.
Mark
Hi Mark,
That all makes good sense to me, and I think this does come down to a question of resource allocation – something that should be dictated by our overall strategy.
As for your point about Symbian communities – I think you’re right, we need to give these more visibility. I’ll raise this.
– Freddie
Has anybody tried to access the symbian.org with a Symbian device? After loading ~300KB on a Nokia E71 there is just a huge blank page with something on the far edges. This is not really too good showcase for Symbian.
Hi,
Yes, we have done. We used a selection of Symbian phones plus non-Symbian phones for testing. I’ll have further testing conducted on the E71 (which was one of the test devices) to see if something has gone awry.
– Freddie
Its looks god. I like flash content. Without flash it would be look so dull. It looks so professional.