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

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

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

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

Will we listen to one of the top consultants in the world?

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