InstaSurvey 7002 - Newly Added Downloads Display - For Your Feedback

The subscriber community provided great feedback and suggestions on the design of the new subscriber downloads experience that we released in July. We were able to incorporate many of your suggestions into the final design. And the feedback we received from you since we released the new downloads experience has been very positive. We’re very glad that you like it. The feature we continue to receive the most requests for is the ability to see newly added downloads without leaving the main subscriber experience. We have the New Subscriber Downloads RSS feeds, and we don’t plan to eliminate those feeds. Based on your requests, we are also looking at incorporating a “Newly Added” TOC category to the new download experience. We came up with a design concept and we’d love your input on the following mockups. [As of November 7, 2008 we are no longer collecting feedback - but take a look and see feedback summary below.]

STEP 1. Go to the Subscriptions Downloads Page

Newly Added Downloads becomes an new entry in the left hand navigation/tree structure. It is circled in red below. Similar to the other items listed, the number of new entries below it is enumerated. In the illustration, there are 5 entries with new items.

What constitutes newly added? Files that are added or updated in the last 60 days that match the filter criteria. For below illustration: All Media Types, English Language, and All Architectures.

STEP 2. Expand the Newly Added Downloads item in the left hand navigation

By clicking the Newly Added Downloads entry in the tree structure shown below, it will expand to display the Product Families that have files meeting the criteria. This is similar to the rest of the navigation paradigm. If you were to expand the Operating Systems entry, you would see the 23 Product Families that make up Operating Systems, and have files matching the filter criteria.

STEP 3. Using the Filter/Search with the Newly Added Downloads

If you use the Search/filter box and enter a term, the filtering would apply to the Newly Added Products group just as it does today to the other Product Groups. In the example below, using the term 2008 results in 2 entries in the Newly Added Downloads section, 2 in Operating Systems, 3 in Servers, and 1 in TechNet Technical Training.

The two entries under Newly Added are also reflected under Operating Systems and Servers.

Clicking the SQL Server 2008 link under Newly Added provides the same exact results in the data grid as clicking on SQL Server 2008 under Servers. The Last Updated column in the data grid can be used to sort the grid by the date.

We are also looking at additional personalization features, and we will solicit community feedback on those as well in future surveys.

Thanks for your time and input!
The Subscriptions Delivery Team

For those of you that responded during the comment period, thank you for your feedback. Here is a summary of the feedback:

Like/Dislike Stats:

Like 11
Dislike 1

Comments/Suggestions, and [and any Microsoft comments]:

Update the RSS more often [New fully programmatic RSS feeds are expected to go live later in November - taking away all latency]
Wants 30 days rather than 60 days duration [this would likely come with additional personalization beyond v1.0, but we hear you!]
Wants to be able to select his own period for “new” - this month, last month, this week, last week or even a specific date [this would likely come with additional personalization beyond v1.0, but we hear you!]
I love it! I don’t know why this wasn't’t in the new design from the start. Everyone wants to know, at-a-glance, what is new since whatever date.
All aspects of the design make sense to me. I can’t wait for the implementation!
I like it, but it’s not really what I would expect. I would expect just the newly added content to appear. The mock-ups appear to support calling it “products with new content”. [We are looking at some options to address this general criticism.]
You get a list of Categories that have changed, but it’s still not a good way to show what items are new (and only what’s new)
I would rather see the actual files that have been added, not the categories where there are new files
I like the site and appreciate being given the opportunity to influence the features and design. Keep up the good work!

Other Suggestions for the Subscriptions Sites:

Ability to select multiple files for download as was possible before.
Ability to easily print to file / electronically store all the information on a download page.
In the list of product families on the left, it is not currently possible to use the middle mouse button to open the product family in a new tab... that would really help. It used to be possible.