We worked hard these past couple weeks to make the Birdhouse app better for you. Here’s what we did over the past 10 days or so.
Polished up and released the new Interactive Email Reminders feature
- Configured some error handling
- Updated the email wording from Ben’s templates
- Tweaked how and when the reminders get sent, based on user settings
- Assigned everyone email addresses that their reminders will interact with
- Set it up so all new users also get their email address for this
- Released Reminders feature!
Building the capability to build/track custom activities
- We know there are so many more activity types that you want the ability to incorporate into your tracking– different categories, and different types of measure and details. We’ve been planning, and have started serious work on bringing an amazing setup for you to be able to do this.
- Do you want a great way to manage ABCs (Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence) that will help you stay consistent in applying what you observe to improve on your behavior goals? We know you do, and we’re going to bring it to you!
- To do that, we worked on making Birdhouse adapt quicker to changes in your use habits
- Had a brainstorming session with Ben and Dani at their house about what this evolution in how Birdhouse handles custom activity types means for future opportunities for Birdhouse
- Started preliminary testing of building custom activities
- Enabled some additional testing of individual custom notes
- Updated our database to handle these coming changes
- Started incorporating the ability to have recurring items in the activity feed other than just Nutrition and Therapy. Very excited about this!
Miscellaneous feature tweaks and improvements for the web
- Tweaked the new user welcome message to help make starting out more fun and clear. If you come to us looking for the best way to figure out which foods correlate to your constipation, we want you to be able to get started right away without any confusion on how to do that.
- Added a prompt field on account creation and made it so that new users have to manually select their time zone and can’t accidentally enter American Samoa because it was the default
- Made the activity page faster for loading and saving new activities, both on the web and mobile
- Fixed a circumstance where the export button was sometimes hidden on the Nutrition page
- Changed the time listed on the Therapist cards and Nutrition items so it shows more of the relevant information you gave it
- Changed the recurring time form to 5 minute increments for more efficient entry, easier choices, and thus better habit creation
Troubleshooting and planning for final round of improvements for iPhone and Android 2.3
- Reviewed the latest feedback from our team and then prepped for discussing with Dan and Ryan, who will be making the necessary changes
- Had lunch with Carlus to discuss overall progress and efficiency, always trying to speed up the timeline, make the results better, and the process more fun
Worked on further improvements to our infrastructure
- Did some ubuntu process investigation and monitoring
- Had coffee with our new friend Matt to talk about working on some Birdhouse projects
- Followed up with another new friend, Anthony, to get him squared away to work on some good code projects here and there
- Helped these guys get set up and familiar with Birdhouse and how it all works
- Considered what they are going to tackle first…
Overall Maintenance and Evaluation
- Ongoing checkins in to make sure that teams using Birdhouse are finding success in doing so
- Monitoring how efficiently people are able to upgrade to Birdhouse Premium if they are interested
- Checked up on how many new downloads/installs/opens our app got in the past week
- Are people clicking mobile app store link on the landing page after creating an account on their mobile browser?
- Were there any Amazon crashes this week?
- What about Android crashes this week?
- iPhone crashes?
- Are people using the Reports page?
- Wrote up a comprehensive development progress update for the team so we can all reset and get an overall view
Ciao, bella.
Let us know what you think. We always love hearing from you.
– Adam