Angry Monkeys

I was hoping to announce the release of Beta 2 today, but alas, we can only really call this Beta 1.5! First thing’s first, if you have any problems with the Navflow beta test, please contact us at support@navflow.com

There isn’t a whole lot of “fun” stuff in this update. Mostly bug fixes, a few feature requests, and a LOT of behind the scenes work preparing for the migration of Fivesecondtest.com. We could’ve held off on releasing this until we’d had a lot of other “features” added, but we have some fairly important things to get out in this version. So what’s here?

1. Karma – We’re releasing the first iteration of what will become the new Karma system. This system is based on the same philosophy as the fivesecondtest.com karma system, but with some important distinctions. First of all, we’re unlocking the amount of Karma you can earn in a day, and we’re taking the cap off how many results you can get with Karma. As of right now, however, you NEED Karma to make tests. To get new users started, you will get 20 karma when you sign up. So you can go ahead and use that straight away to create a test. What this means in the future however, is that for every result you want for free, you need to help out someone else. At the moment, this is a free for all. But there are some “checks and balances” being put in place to prevent “gaming” the system. So be good for goodness sake!

2. Language support – This isn’t full localisation unfortunately, but it does give you the ability to view tests that are in YOUR language. When users create a test, they let us know what language it is in, and then we only show that test to people who speak that language. This is based on your browser language, but for registered users is configurable from the settings page. Registered users will ONLY be shown tests for languages they’ve selected. Anonymous users, however, will be show tests in their language until there are none left, and then will start seeing international tests. Test owners can also set to only allow users who explicitly state they speak that language. Whilst this should significantly improve the quality of your results, this option could slow down the rate at which you receive results depending on what language you choose. As a result of this change, we’ll be adding a lot of our international sign-ups later this week.

3. User dashboard – There have been a few comments about how the Navflow logo not taking users “home”. This is actually because we hadn’t finished our user dashboard page yet. It’s now (mostly) finished. What this means is that if you’re a registered user, you will no longer need to go to the front page of the site. You will be taken to your own dashboard showing you how much credit, karma and results you have. There is a lot more coming to this page, so stay tuned!

Ok well, that’s the bulk of it. There are a lot of other minor changes, and a lot more to come. We’ll be adding some more testers today, so if you are desperate to get into beta, email us at support@navflow.com and let us know! If you read all of this, you deserve to get in!

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As some of you may know we have been hinting at something new over the last couple of weeks. Not a new feature or a redesign but an entirely new app, and today I am happy to announce that the fruit of our labour is launching under the moniker of navflow.

With navflow we believe we have created a novel approach to testing how people navigate websites and applications. The traditional approach to running usability tests of this nature has mostly involved the testing of live interfaces. While this is a perfectly valid means of gaining valuable user insight, implementing design changes can be prohibitively costly and difficult to implement once a website or application is live.

Our solution was to move testing into the design phase and give designers tools that allow them to run user analysis using mock ups and wire frames. This approach has proven to be very successful on fivesecondtest with almost a thousand people participating in and creating tests every day. For navflow we wanted to take design phase testing even further and let designers see how users navigate their designs without needing to build them first. To that effect we have built a testing platform that takes a series of images and creates a conversion funnel from it. The designer is responsible for highlighting areas of the image that result in successful conversions and we allow successful clicks to proceed along the funnel.

Navflow is currently in beta and open to registrations, however new accounts will need to be activated in batches in order for us to stay on top of any bugs or other issues that may arise with a new launch. Bear in mind that this is a beta and so may still be a little rough around the edges, we will be working hard over the coming weeks to get everything up to scratch. We are eager to hear your thoughts so please send any bug reports, feedback or even praise to support@navflow.com

And so with that, happy testing!

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Navflow beta will be coming this week. More details when we launch.

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