Thank you for helping us test the Collections system at Nexus Mods! This article is intended to help you understand the planned release phases for the project, where we are now and the overall aims for each phase.
We follow an Agile framework at Nexus Mods which means we deliver improvements to our products incrementally. With this in mind, the following phases outline how collections will evolve during our development phases to deliver the initial release of the product; Collections 1.0. This will be the first official release of collections containing all features that we have planned for the initial version.
It doesn’t end there though, as with other Nexus Mods products, we will continue to enhance and develop collections in the future to make it even better for users, striving to fulfill our mission of making mods easy.
This is the very first phase where we invite members of the community to help us test an initial set of core functions. A hand-picked few will be selected to test collections and are required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to participate. The NDA requirement will later be dropped and a much wider user base invited to participate through an invitation banner shown on the Nexus Mods website to users whose site activity meets defined criteria.
The main aim of this phase is to onboard testers who will be instrumental in helping us track down critical bugs, influence planned features, highlight missing features and those requiring improvement.
In this phase, there will be no limitation on who can volunteer to test collections. Curators can create collections but cannot list them automatically themselves. Instead they can choose to nominate their collection to the Nexus Community team who will review the collection to check it meets quality standards. If successful the Nexus Community team will list the collection publicly.
Collections should not be considered feature complete during this phase, but we’ll be getting pretty close with primary functions for curators and users in place and adding additional supplementary features and improvements periodically within this phase.
The main aim of this phase is to continue to canvas feedback from a large number of early adopters, test scalability of our infrastructure and to further identify bugs through the increased amount of real data. We will also be utilising analytics as well as user submitted feedback to identity UX/UI improvements.
Collections is now feature complete against our defined scope for version 1.0. All planned features have been released and curators now have the ability to list their own collections without requiring approval. Continuing from open alpha, anyone who wants to utilise collections can do so freely with the understanding that although stability improvements will have been made during the previous phase, some bugs should still be expected.
Our main focus in this phase is to continue to test scalability and utilise analytics and feedback to test and drive improvements. We will also begin to measure user satisfaction and continue to develop internal tools for our staff.
The official launch of collections. Utilising the learnings of all previous phases, we consider collections feature complete with all features thoroughly tested and stable.
Our main focus in this phase is to encourage more members to use collections by further enhancing navigation and integration between Nexus Mods & collections.
We won’t stop here though, this is just the beginning...