Communication works!
Great part of my role at Wizi is to communicate with users all around the world, understand what they expect from our service and listen to their feedback and suggestions. We constantly perform tests in all platforms we support but our users are definitely the best help we can get to improve an application that was designed for them. These improvements may regard new features like adding an option to share locations by email or being able to share on social networks (soon), but they also regard bug fixing or even rethinking interface design if we realize that it is not working properly.
This week we were contacted by Ben Simmons, a BlackBerry user reporting an issue on Wizi SMS Location. A bug was preventing him from selecting the contact to send the location message:
“I select a message in your app, click next and it takes me to contacts. I select a contact and number, that takes me back to select a message???”
Every time he was trying to select a contact it was like if he was pressing the back button. In order to send location messages he found the work around of copying the body of the message to the clipboard and paste it into the SMS application.
We performed several tests on cell phones and simulators trying to reproduce the issue and finally we found out that this was happening when the contact contained special characters and parentheses, like: (44) 444 444 444. The bug was quickly fixed and in the next day we were releasing a new version of Wizi SMS for BlackBerry (1.2.4.0). Ben managed to receive a working app for his BlackBerry and also helped other users preventing them of getting the same bug.
Like Ben, there are many more users that have been helping us with feedback. We do value our users, listen to them and care about their user experience. Stories are not always so effective like this one: some bugs are very specific and some features requested by users require development time, but hey: communication works!