I sometimes wonder how user preferences are analyzed and I guess that Nokia gets some help from a survey company from time to time.

Then I wonder, why Nokia doesn't make publicly available user preference surveys in it's main & local websites available to the whole public all the time (yes, never-ending surveys), so they could hear/predict and adapt user choices faster then anyone in the market; or why I haven't seen these surveys if they were done publicly?

I am also a "Nokia Pilot" but I briefly had some surveys and I didn't receive any mission yet. I don't know how many "Nokia Pilot"s exist but think about the whole public that visits Nokia's website, that crowd. And bring some motivation to the game..

-> Build an ambitious & appetitive title for the global survey, like "Tell us what you want and let us give it to you", and give it back really.
-> Go further & smarter and make a contest for each country that Nokia is available in the world, which that each country can design their own "National Nokia" phone by choosing their between hardware / software element preferences in an online survey supported with really good media coverage?
-> Go even deeper and host a Eurovision-ish beauty contest for "National Nokia"s in each continent to sell the winner handset in that continent?

Why don't you go creative Nokia?

making research publicly available would be stupid on there part, nokia spend millions on research, surveys etc, if they was to make it public then the results become useless to them in terms of getting ahead in the market as their rivals would get access to it all too. so anything meaningful will never be made public until it gets old and redundant

I didn't mean that results would be available to the public; just surveys' themselves

there is lots of public surveys in the UK by nokia to tell the truth they are annoying, i cant click on a nokia site without a dam survey popping up lol
i'm always getting surveys by email too regarding feedback for there software services

Even a well-designed survey can be strategic, so I can understand Nokia keeping the design secret as well. It's unfortunate for this open-oriented crowd, but it's a sticky issue.

Well, I agree that's annoying but if Nokia just put a small banner to the site which's saying "Shaping the future together" (as Betalabs) on it and it's used for both betalabs & surveys entrance globally.

I imagine one of the biggest problems they have with the whole survey thing is selection bias and actually asking the people who are most likely to be their customers. If they had an online survey asking "How important is it that your phone run an open OS?" and that got linked from slashdot, they'd get an incredible response in the affirmative, but they'd have no way to tell if this is really that big of a deal to the majority of their target market. I'm sure a huge part of the work that their "survey contractor" does is making sure the survey gets into the hands of a diverse group of people who represent their target market.

-John

I suspect that there have been extensive surveys but without the Nokia name on the survey (just on the cheque to the survey company). You don't get to be number one by closing yourself off from public opinion.

OTOH, a design your own cell phone website would be a nice PR move. Something where people could offer suggestions for the next generation using the Asus/Intel WePC website as a model (user submissions and voting on submissions).

http://www.wepc.com/