As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been a lot less active on the forum. That’s something I’d like to change now that I’m fully settled into my new role. However, for those that have missed me, I do apologize. I have severely underestimated the amount of valuable work that I could do in these past weeks. That said, I once promised something about “transperancy and involvement”. As such, I’d like to take you with me on a quick tour of all things happening.
There are many, many amazing things lying in the near future. In fact, we've just had a big update with functionality for MRA Routeplanner. You can now create great animations and even view your routes in 3D. Great, right? Well, yes and no. It's great that we're continuing to expand our functionality, but we've kind of dropped the ball on communication lately. I mean, 3D map was supposed to be in 1.6. and Animate wasn’t mentioned at all, right? Right.
What I want to reinforce is that the RoadMap is still our effictive guiding tool for the future of MRA Routeplanner, because there has been a lot of feedback from the community regarding the contents of 1.2. and how long it took to build, as a result, we’ve moved up some nice features that would really aid you right away whilst keeping the core of the RoadMap intact.
Another point is design; more and more people have been complaining that the look and feel of MRA is starting to look dated. Recent attempts to make the waypoints look better have been met with hesitance at best and outright disapproval at worst. I take that very seriously and have made a significant improvement in our design process. We’re now working with two additional designers, a junior with amazing talents and a senior with 14 years of experience, while I will remain in overall charge of the “User Experience”. After all, while I might not be able to draw the right images anymore, I’m fairly confident I still know what our community likes in terms of how the website should “feel”. That said, you can imagine getting two out-of-the-blue designers worked into our organization is a pretty intense project.
We also have new staff that’s moving on community projects. When I started that in 2019, writing newsletters, segmenting our audiences into groups that liked this or that and started becoming active on our forum, you could almost physically feel the change of tune within our community. Whilst it isn’t the most sexy job, keeping our members knowledgeable about our whereabouts is absolutely essential to stay involved in the right discussions.
In addition, we’re working two new team members into the role of Support Agents, as we’ll be saying goodbye to two of our veterans in december this year. Since research amongst current employees pointed out that onboarding new staff has been a key issue for our company, a lot of work has gone into ensuring that all of the new employees will “land” properly within the organization.
So, that’s the puddle of ankle-deep joy that we’re currently standing in. What lies directly ahead? First of all, we’re overhauling the RouteXpert library and home page as part of 1.3. This will provide you all with an opportunity to see the direction we’re taking our new designs in and I’m very certain you’ll love it. Sneak peak of one of the elements below.
Assuming that this is received positively, we’ll move forward with 1.4 and preparing the work for 1.5. That means improving the group/event functionality along with “business accounts” for licence management and professional use, improved live-traffic functionality, Travel overview and beginning the “great work” on getting all of our pages in a fresh new coat that doesn’t evoke resistance.
As always, feel free to respond and ask questions.
Timo
