Thanks for the suggestions @afriendinberlin. I’ll respond very quickly to each idea, but let me say upfront that it’s helpful to get this feedback and even if we don’t act on it immediately, I always note it down and then balance it carefully against other priorities.
Stop button
I have been considering this since your previous post about the same idea because I do take your point.
But when users hit pause, they see the option to end the tour instead, with the stop button in that dialogue and a note about resuming tours. They only see this the first time they pause the tour:
The pin at the end of the tour also reuses this icon. We don’t hear about this as a source of confusion regularly – and we do get a lot of feedback in general, so if there was widespread confusion I think we would know. That makes it difficult to prioritise.
I do think the use case is different to Komoot, which is only providing navigation, and that stopping the tour and pausing the audio are not quite the same thing when you’re using VoiceMap.
Updates
The exact use case you’re describing, with testers needing to delete and redownload tours, is fairly niche. But this is something we could do with relative ease and I will add it to the roadmap.
Larger updates, where we are making wholesale changes to an already published tour, are more complicated because these tend to be totally different “tours” on our database. You couldn’t just check the download date against the date of the most recent changes and show a dialogue to delete and redownload.
That’s why I say this is niche: it would only ever serve a handful of users, and the improvement for them would be fairly small.
Bulk Text-to-Speech
Thanks for pointing out how to do this @treksierranevada.
Cloning with Pics
Yes, we should definitely improve cloning. I’ll add this to the list.
Editing Published Tours
This is again much more complicated that it seems on the face of things. A published tour is locked because it is now available for download and when people download the tour they are pulling it from the same DB you are pushing to when you edit that tour. So you can break things in real time if you move a pin accidentally, or replace final audio with text-to-speech audio with a misclick.
To do what you’re asking, we would need to build robust versioning features so we could lock the published version of the tour and make sure it is the version being downloaded by users while updates are being made by publishers. Would we then give the publishers access to the updates for testing – and track the multiple versions now in circulation? You can see how you quickly reach a point of significant technical complexity, and I’d estimate many weeks of work for a team of 5 or 6 people, excluding testing.
There also isn’t huge demand for this beyond our 10 or 20 most active publishers. So this is another thing that is hard to prioritise, especially when the editors really are very happy to assist with this.
At the moment a lot of our product development is focused on converting and retaining users. By converting, I mean getting more people to buy tours after they install the app for the first time. By retaining, I mean keeping them engaged beyond just tours so that when they get home or go on their next holiday, they remember VoiceMap and do another tour. 35% of direct sales this year have come from returning customers buying their second, third or 30th tour.
I hope that makes sense, and thanks again for the input.
