Focus Group Brought in to Shape the New Android Market?
Everyone has their gripes with the Android market: “it’s too cluttered”, “there’s no way to filter anything”, “I don’t like the dark-on-light color scheme, change it to pink on black instead”. We’ve seen Google prove that they are willing and able to bring about a better market experience in the past, and we could be headed for another major curve.
AndroidPolice.com is reporting that Google chose 16 participants through a mult-stage focus group to give their thoughts on several market features that Google’s throwing up in the air. Questions ranged from your usual filter and weight-based searching algorithms to other exciting prospects such as social networking integration from services like Facebook and Twitter.
- 7 day journal of app use habits including what we installed/uninstalled, how many times we went to the market, what categories we looked at, whatapps we used and where we learned about apps (market, websites, etc) this was done every day for 7 days.
- After 7 days, roughly 16 people were chosen for interviews at Google.
- Asked about future features and how interested we would be in them. Spent a lot of time on social integration such as twitter, facebook.
- Asked/talked about Guru/expert ranks for some developers on the market
- Asked about Following/favoriting developers on the market
- Asked about developer bios on the market which would include links to their site, twitter, whatever
- Asked about app recommending such as a feature to recommend apps you like to friends via the market
- A whole lot about social networking/integration
- Asked about filters for searching within the market including searching using variable like a certain rank or higher
- Asked/talked about developer responding to comments
- No time line mentioned. Could be this market update could be after it.
A focus study doesn’t necessarily guarantee any or all of what’s discussed is going to be implemented, but it does give a pretty good idea of the direction Google wants to head in. If AndroidPolice’s tipster is to be believed, then I think we may have an interesting update to look forward to once talks about Gingerbread start floating around.
[Note]: Image is not of the focus group in question.