2015 roadmap

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albummaster
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  • Posted: 01/05/2015 12:30
  • Post subject: 2015 roadmap
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BEA is now entering its tenth year, and I'm really wanting to make a big push this year to move the site forwards and implement a few of those bigger uncompleted features that have been hanging around for a long while.

2014 saw traffic increasing 7% year on year and 30% of traffic on BEA is now from mobile or tablet devices (compared to 25% a year ago) despite BEA not having a mobile optimised site. The average number of active users increased by 19% during 2014 (and on the forums by 8%). The site now contains 40% more albums than at the end of last year (66,042 albums compared to 46,673 at the end of 2013).

The number of outstanding (uncompleted) features on the 'to do' list is about 350 (including quite a few suggestions from the survey) (2013: 230 items), so the 'to do' list is running away a little bit and some serious work needs to be done to prune it back.

Survey results
The user survey produced some very useful feedback, so thank you to everybody that took the time to respond. Every piece of your feedback has been reviewed, noted, and logged.

Although a lot of people love the BEA community, by far the most common complaint about BEA in the survey was that the forums are seen to be "clique-y" & difficult for people to break into. The site needs to accommodate different types of people & be a place where everybody feels welcome.

The next main aspect of criticism concerns the layout of the site. The site generally looks "dated" and doesn't render well on mobile devices. Given that mobile device usage is increasing year-on-year, this is a key area that needs to be looked at in 2015 & I entirely agree with the feedback.

The third aspect concerns the overall rankings. The current system is not seen to recognise lesser-known artists so well. These artists don't appear in many charts & so their ranking is low & the chart isn't varied enough because "popular" artists tend to dominate the top positions. The algorithm needs to be improved in 2015 so that the chart is less of a popularity contest.

There were also some great suggestions to improve the site. I'm just going to the list the bigger ideas here (any bugs or minor changes have been logged separately and will also be addressed during future site updates):

The first thing to note here is that a lot of features that people requested in the survey already exist on BEA! (e.g. black listing people to hide their comments, viewing a random album/chart, user points for creating charts, option to see how your chart looked in the past etc.) So, an area that needs to be improved on BEA is the help guide (& a more detailed explanation of what features exist on the site).

Genre charts. By the most requested feature in the survey was to have genre information for each album so that people can drill into the best jazz or rap albums etc and get ideas for further listening.

It was suggested that newer releases should be more prominent on BEA and this could be tied together with member reviews. There could be featured reviews (of say 400 words) on BEA, and users could be rewarded with points for providing these.

Recommendations. People would like to see better quality recommendations for similar artists or albums and these could be personalised. Netflix was cited as a service that does very well at providing these.

BestEverMovies/Books/Games etc. BEA will always be an album site. Personally, I'd like BEA to become something like iMdb or GoodReads just focusing on one area and becoming the "go to" site for music albums in the same way that iMdb is for films and GoodReads is for books. I don't see the scope of the site changing whilst I am the only person developing the site.

More integration with external services such as Bandcamp, Metacritic, Last.fm, Plug.dj & Spotify.

Folders to organise custom charts and a 'portal' system to present these.

New chart types of chart. A common request was for song charts, but artist and collaborative charts were also mentioned.

Track data could be enhanced by time lengths for each song, song lyrics and sound samples.

A fairly common request was for a community chat-room or instant messaging.

So, how to prioritise all of this?
Firstly, the site layout needs to be changed to become more mobile friendly. This is the most important thing on the list right now. This will also involve modernising the "look & feel", changing the navigation and making the site easier to use. This process will begin straight away & I will seek designers internally & externally to help re-design a modern-looking responsive layout. If anybody wants to volunteer some expertise, or wants to be involved, please let me know via PM.

Secondly, genre charts need to be added. Long overdue.

Everything else after this will be re-prioritised following the above as it's too difficult to see beyond at the moment. Also noting that quite a few of the ideas were already on the list (e.g. the chat room, genre charts, custom chart folders etc). These ideas have all been logged so will be implemented at some stage.

2015 should be another great year for the site. Thank you to everybody for your continued support .

albummaster
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