Macromedia.com Beta : The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

We launched our new website site last week, and as I am sure most people in the community know, it generated quite a lot of discussion. Well, we were listening. We took the feedback (from the community, survey, feedback forms, and talking to directly to users), tweaked the site, and have released a new version of the website. The new home page is a hybrid site combining HTML and Flash, has a more straight forward navigation scheme, and loads much quicker now.

We learned a ton of things from the first week of the beta, and while everything didn’t work out as we had planned, we decided the information was too valuable to keep to ourselves. We have put together a report about what we learned from the first stage of the beta. The report outlines what worked (the exchanges) and what didn’t (the home page), and provides detailed information, statistics and survey results about the website’s first week.

You can view the report here.

Some of the interesting info you can find from the report:

• Connection speed did not influence how people rated their experience on the site.
• Processor speed did influence how people rated the site.
• The number of downloads on the exchange doubled.
• Customer satisfaction for the Rich Internet Applications on the site were generally high.
• Very few users used any of the advanced navigation on the home page (less than 5%).

Is the new site perfect? Not yet. We are still working on improving it. If you have any comments or suggestions, let us know about them through the feedback form, and / or survey.

Visit the updated website here.