In my last article on the redesign of Nozbe for iOS7 I focused primarily on the imperfections that managed to evade our scrutiny when we shipped our last update of the app. The piece turned out to be extremely important to our Nozbe team. It stirred up a lot of emotions as it focused on our mistakes and oversights and that’s always hard to accept. But it left us with a lot of motivations and determination to keep our promises: we fixed all the bugs and everything that annoyed our users the most, also patching up a few “cosmetic” things in the process.
Let’s take a look:
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Annoying recurring authorization prompts for Dropbox and Evernote now appear only once after the application is launched. Simply click the box or elephant icon to authorize the accounts at a moment of your choosing.
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We removed all erroneously created empty cells, like for example, when the space bar character was entered or when the nothing was entered into the title/name field. Now, only after entering any number of characters (whitespace is not a character) does the app allow us to schedule an action, record a note, etc. If we don’t do that, a pop-up will appear to state the reason why we cannot schedule or write something down.
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We removed empty cells that were selected for reasons unknown to the user (cf. time settings in action details).
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Popovers that were chaotically moving all over the place were “stopped” and tethered to the right hand edge of the application.
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The notification badges on the app icon now clearly indicate actions that are overdue and those which are past their deadline.
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In the iPhone version of the app, pressing and holding the task cell in next action in editing mode resulted in the appearance of a pop-up that made it very difficult to change the order of the tasks, sometimes making it impossible to do so. We removed this feature from edit mode, now it’s available only in the normal mode. These pop-ups serve an informational purpose and also allow us to move to any task in a given project. Therefore, this particular feature is not needed in edit mode as editing revolves mostly around other actions (i.e. changing information, deleting, changing the order of tasks).
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In previous versions, when a note or action was created the user had to guess (and then learn) what role does each of the empty fields play (or if they even have a role). Now, these fields have appropriate placeholder names, like Description and Task name.
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We also squashed a bug plaguing iPhone 5 users which made the upper part of the screen hide under the navigation bar in landscape mode.
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We introduced one additional improvement. In previous versions, creating a new action, entering its name and then going on to edit its particulars changed the window so that all important details were visible except one: title/name of the action. Additionally, we’re now able to edit it.
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In the iPhone version, when changing the name of a project, we had to leave the window and come back to it see the changes we made. Now, all changes are introduced in real time.
We’re happy with the improvements we made, but we still have a lot to do. Following the precepts of the Japanese kaizen philosophy, we’re trying to achieve perfection through continuous, minute improvements. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our users participating in this “process” for their observations, vigilance, and patience.
