Ovi and its fans: the Berlin event

One of the key reasons for us to have the Ovi social media feeds and Nokia Beta Labs  is to understand which of our services you like the most, and what you want to more from Ovi. So, we constantly monitor the feedback that you give us in these forums, and deliver them back to the team who develop the products and services. We may not reply to all of your comments, but trust me, we read each and everyone and make sure that the associated team reads them too!

However, we thought it is much more effective to get a bunch of you and a bunch of us in the same room from time to time, and discuss your experiences with some of our services. So as a pilot, last December, we invited some of you guys who have been active in Nokia Beta Labs and our internal feedback channels to visit the Ovi team in Berlin, and tell the product makers their experiences and expectations about Ovi.

We wanted to have an initial event with at least 10 key users, but a combination of visa offices across the world and weather caused only seven of them to turn up. We had an all male group from different parts of the world – Australia, Italy, Paris, Germany, London, Poland & Finland. We started out late due to snow wrecking chaos in the streets and airports of Berlin (lesson learnt: never hold an event in Berlin during winter).

We kicked off the event with a quick round of introductions between the participants and the various product makers from Ovi. Afterwards, Kee Cheng, John Markow and Tracy Rolling explained to the key users how we work on the feedback from various sources.

After that, it was the key users time to talk to us. Carl from Australia shared with us on how his trucking company uses Ovi for his trucking routes. Others shared on how they use Maps in their daily lives, and how much they appreciate the offline capabilities of Maps. The conversation then shifted to their suggestions on the future versions of Maps, and the Product team listened, challenged and debated some ideas, and agreed whole heartedly in other cases.

The discussion shifted to our dinner venue, and by the end of the night, we had really valuable feedback and insights from our key users. We were awed and humbled by their deep knowledge of our product, and by how much they loved Ovi. Our heartfelt thanks (also vielen Dank, kiitos, dziękuję, grazie and merci) to them, and to you all, who take the time to tell us what you love and hate about us.

The next day, the guys spent time taking the Trabants, the iconic East German cars, for a spin in the town. And then it was time for them to say good bye, and take their pizza boxes home with them

Given the positive feedback from the product owners and guests, we are planning to set up more of these events in the future, and invite our valued users to them. If you would like to participate in such future events, all you have to do is go to betalabs.nokia.com, register/sign in, download some of the cool apps and services that Ovi has for you, use them, and give us your feedback.