Greetings Xbox Insiders! The Xbox Insider Program is on the cusp of something exciting, and we want to bring you along for the ride. We want to demonstrate our commitment to transparency, inclusivity, and of course, listening to you! We are pleased to announce that work has begun on a new version of the Xbox Insider Hub – one with the goal of being faster, better organized, and simpler to navigate, all with a different yet familiar user interface. This isn’t just an update to the current Hub, this is an all new app built from the ground up.
One of the most frequent pieces of feedback we hear about the app itself is that new content and updates are hidden behind too many button clicks, so we’re creating this new Xbox Insider Hub with the goal of getting you to the content you care about faster. This is an Xbox Insider Hub that you have already helped design through your feedback to us. We want to continue that cycle of feedback and will be inviting you to flight it when we have a build ready in the next few months.
Along with this new Xbox Insider Hub, you may notice several service changes that we’re making in order to accommodate the new development. This includes the ways in which we’ll be asking for your feedback on experiences across Xbox. As a matter of fact, many of you have already noticed one of our first changes and filed a few bugs about it. (Thank you! We love that you’re watching!)
To create a simpler experience, one of the first things we’re changing is the way we use surveys. If you look at all the ways we ask you a question and then get feedback, you’ll notice three very similar vehicles used in the past: the Survey, the Quick Poll, and the Rating. In essence, these three things are the same:
- A Quick Poll was simply a one question survey.
- A Rating was also a one question survey, shown in a special way.
- The Survey is a well understood thing: As a question, or multiple questions, and get an answer from the people who care the most.
We’ve decided that combining all three of these tools into one, the Survey, would make the most intuitive sense. In the past, each of these different types had their own distinct use and designation within Xbox Insider Services (the back-end software that powers the Xbox Insider Hub). Because we have the opportunity to make positive changes to the way our services call these feedback types, we’ve begun deprecating (removing) the Rating and the Quick Poll types, in favor of broader usage of the plainly named “Survey.”
You’ve probably noticed a pattern to both Ratings and Quick Polls. Ratings were star based – choose one answer from a list of between one and five stars. Quick polls were multiple choice, allowing you to choose one answer among a list of multiple choices. Surveys, however, could be one question or multiple, could have branching logic, and could be answered with freetext, multiple choice, multi-select, or other creative means. Ratings and Quick Polls had very specific uses, which is why they were created as their own type. As the Xbox Insider Hub has evolved, so too has the survey functionality to encompass everything these two other types included.
It will take some time for us to incorporate Surveys in the way we used Ratings and Quick Polls in the past, which in transparency means a
temporary period where those quick, 5 XP awards won’t be available. Once we have this transition work done, you’ll begin to see the new surveys used in nearly the same way as Ratings and Quick Polls, though their location will be slightly different. We always encourage you to use Report a problem for bug reports or to alert us when you encounter anything unexpected. Because Ratings won’t be used in quite the same way in the future, it is even more important to use Report a problem to let us know about any quality issues that you experience.
As always, we welcome your feedback. The roadmap for this new Xbox Insider Hub is expected to take us into the first part of 2020, and as above, we’re planning to allow you to test a build once we have one ready to show. Keep watching the Blog and the
r/XboxInsiders subreddit for more info.
Thank you, Xbox Insiders, for everything that you do. Your power and ability to shape the future of Xbox is awesome, and we hope to make your experience within the Xbox Insider Hub better than ever.
