Continuous improvements make customers happy

Apps Magnet — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:26:43 +0000

Incremental and consistent improvements can lead to great victories. That’s what I wrote on my personal blog moments ago. Here is a list of recent improvements we made to PlannerX.

Bookmarklet works in IE8

We announced PlannerX bookmarklet last week. The bookmarklet lets you open PlannerX right in your Basecamp page. This makes updating your plans super quick and easy. We had a small issue that prevented it from working in IE8 (thanks Stephanie for reporting it!). We fixed that and even added a visual guide about setting up the bookmarklet with IE8. Enjoy!

PlannerX Bookmarklet in IE8

Login problems solved

Few customers mentioned they could not login to PlannerX despite making sure everything was setup correctly – username, password, URL, API access – everything. This was a puzzling problem, but we could solve it in minutes once we got access to the problematic account. It was actually our mistake. We forgot to handle dashes in Basecamp sub domains in a recent upgrade. It’s now fixed and working fine.

Easier login form

While we were on the login functionality, we also made a small usability improvement to the login form. You now don’t have to enter your full Basecamp URL. Just enter the initial company name / sub-domain part. .basecampq.com is added already. This will even make it easier for people to understand what they need to enter in that field! Here’s how the revised login form looks.

More usable login screen for PlannerX

Bug with new task saving solved

I am glad not many customers noticed this We had a jarring bug that wouldn’t save a new task if both the milestone and todo list were also freshly created. It was another quick fix, but a significant one!

How do all these small improvements measure up?

Here’s what Ben Thomas, a PlannerX customer had to say:

WAHOO!

Fantastic response.
Thank you ever so much. Wonderful.
That is brilliant. Thank you.

Ben

Makes my day!

PlannerX – user feedback coming in, solving bugs

Apps Magnet — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:54:57 +0000

As more people signup for PlannerX, our customer feedback has also started coming in. We have discovered some limitations of the system and are working on them. Here are some of the problems that are on top of my list.

No projects found error. Seems to occur when there are a lot of projects on Basecamp account.
String can not be parsed as XML error. Occurs due to Unicode encoding issues. Affects people using non English characters – and this is majority of our customers!
404 Error on plan save. Occurs when you promote / demote existing plan items.

If you are our customer, I want to let you know that we are working on these items, and will have solutions soon.

I am a little upset and worried due to these issues. At the same time, I am thrilled by the commitment of PlannerX users! Kudos!