Test Drive Team Update: Taking Notes

The Social News Desk Test Drive Team has been continuing to try out the new SND Dashboard and our developers have been taking notes from the team’s feedback. The most recent updates have included moving some buttons around in the user interface to match more closely with the current Dashboard. The UI may continue to change as we get more feedback, but so far everyone has seemed to enjoy the most recent changes. A few little polishes have launched on the dashboard, including displaying verified badges on Twitter accounts in the stream, faster loading for Twitter columns, and overall performance improvements. Of course, our developers are not done with those improvements yet! Several users told us how much they love some of the current features in Dashboard, including Twitter list support, Quick Posts, and the Social News Report. Aaron King, Social News Desk’s VP of Engineering, says there are some planned improvements to the Social News Report based on widgets in the Dashboard. There will also be improvements to Quick Posts, but the same features that people love now will still be in place. As far as widgets are concerned, the widget library is now in place as a demo for our testers, but not yet complete. We’re working on a proprietary algorithm that will measure certain engagement factors to score users and properties, and one of our users, Ryan Morris of Quincy Interactive, says his head is “all busting with ideas.” The big question on everyone’s mind now – when is the new Dashboard going to launch? King says we’ll start moving some customers to the new Dashboard in May, so keep an eye out for messaging from our team to learn when your newsroom is cleared to start training and move to the new platform. We’re excited to get everyone started!