This release upgrades our friends, reminders, and the daily stats email features, and also fixes one major bug.
* We’ve split out the friends section into people who follow you, people you follow on Twitter, and people you follow on Facebook. We’ve also added new ways to invite people.
* You can now set reminders at ten minute increments (previously, you could only set them to arrive on the hour).
* The daily email, which includes a summary of recent activity, should now arrive at 7am local time (it used to be sent to everyone in the morning, Pacific Time) and should include a short summary of activity from your friends.
* We’ve fixed one bug that was causing crashes during the check-in process.
Below is some background on how we think about our release process.
Some companies like to wrap big changes up in giant releases. Obviously, if you’re one of the people that’s been reading our release notes, you’ve noticed that we’re not such a company.
The Lift philosophy is continuous improvement. Trust in the power of compounding interest. Your habits add up to a vastly improved you. And our incremental changes add up to a vastly improved Lift.
I was thinking about the pros and cons of the continuous improvement approach to our product over this past weekend because we have big designs in the works and we still want to release that big set of changes to you on a continual as-ready basis.
The pro is that you get features earlier and we stay focused on doing the work that has the most impact. The con is that sometimes we release a feature that clearly needs more work.
The daily stats email, which is read by 15% of you, is an interesting case study.
The email was originally built as a quick and dirty test of the graphs that we wanted to build in the app. The in-email graphs were a big success and we immediately added them inside the app, on the check-in and profile screens.
But the email feature stayed. We originally thought the feature would be a temporary prototype, but we changed our minds when we saw how many people read them.
However, we didn’t take the time to put more thought into what else needed to be done with those emails. For example, since launch, we’ve always sent them in the morning, Pacific Time.
If you live where I live, that’s a great time to get the email. However if you were getting yesterday’s data in the evening of the next day…
So that’s the downside. Every now and then, something slips by and stays too long in a half-finished state.
But usually we’re better than that. It’s amazing how many features can both work immediately and also have clear room for improvement.
We’re very much looking forward to sharing the new designs we have in the works. You’ll see them initially as a collection of small changes. But they add up to something amazing. Thank you for your feedback along the way—hearing from you is our daily motivation.
