April Update

It's time for our monthly recap on what's new and what's to come but with the added impact of a global shutdown to contend with! In March we were confident that disruption to the app's development would be minimal as we could easily continue from home but in reality the situation proved very different.

While the team seamlessly relocated to the safety of their bubbles the stresses COVID-19 placed on the businesses we support meant they needed us more than ever. A combination of new projects to launch urgently, fixe required as soon as possible and the need to be as agile as possible meant Review Tui's development took a back seat.

We want to do this properly and even though we're close to a market-ready product we're not willing to make compromises. We don't want to rush to the finish line only to then spend the preceding months fixing things that should have been done properly. Instead, we want to be focused on bringing new features out to those businesses using the platform. This means launching with all of our ducks in a row and making quality a priority.

We're lucky in that we don't have outside investors involved on this project. Yes, having them would mean more money to hire more people but it also comes with expectations and compromise. Our vision is to develop software that's setting a new benchmark, and we want to ensure that's a benchmark in excellence and not rubbish!

April wasn't a complete empty basket and we still managed to deliver a few cool features.

Social sharing

One thing we were keen to do was make it very easy for a business to use the excellent feedback they receive to et more customers. This already exists in the form of the option for a reviewer to leave a public review on your elected third-party platforms but we want to make it easy to use your other feedback too. So, we created a social sharing feature.

Now, when you receive feedback in Review Tui, you'll be able to click 'Share'

This takes you to a basic editor where you can change the background colour, star colour, text colour, your logo height and the height of the stars.

It is a very basic editor, so that's all we have available for now, but it exports as a PNG in the size required by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin to make it really easy for basic posts to go up. It will save your previous settings too so it's even quicker to create a social post the next time.

If you're looking for more complex design tools then free to use platforms like Canva offer exceptional customisation if you need something more for your marketing needs. For a business that doesn't have the time to design anything too fancy this should work perfectly, and yes we do plan on upgrading this feature in the future. Let us know what you'd like to see in this feature in the future.

Mapping and architecture

A lot of time was also directed towards mapping and planning the back-end of the app. This is important as we investigate long-term server options and assess the best solution for data privacy and reliable up-time for the app. We want you to be able to access your information quickly and reliably without worrying about security and that means investigating the best server options going forward.

This has the typically celebrated status of requiring many hours of work for no visible reward yet saves many more hours of work in the future. Maybe the world would be a better place if every so often we stopped and appreciated the work we weren't doing at that moment because of foresight and pre-planning? Like sitting down at your desk with a coffee in hand 2 minutes to 8am rather than rushing in 5 minutes late with an egg stain on your top because you forgot to check your alarm the night before. Or is that just me?

So, with a cool new feature under our belt for beta users to enjoy we're on to the next thing. There's a chance we might add a 'Powered by Review Tui' at the bottom of the social sharing PNGs for our free accounts but we're still making decision on that currently.

We're looking ahead now to tackling one of the last major features and wow, it's a big one.

Surveys are at the core of Review Tui. We need users (you guys) to be able to ask the questions that really matter so you can get the feedback needed to move your business forward. It turns out that that's an easy concept, and mostly easy to build, but by adding one or two extra things we've made it quite complicated for ourselves.

We do truly believe though that we need to offer these extra features and don't want to compromise. After all, there are dozens of survey sites out there but with ours focused on customer feedback, and measuring a business's success at constantly satisfying customers, we need to go that little bit further. We also have a large roadmap of improvements to launch to surveys over time and need to ensure we're not painting ourselves into a corner by launching the wrong solution.

So that's it for our April update! Not bad bearing in mind everything that's been going on in the world and we've been able to see the feedback from our beta users are getting as they navigate the tricky waters of a world with COVID-19 and the disruption that's brought. For a few there's been some heartfelt appreciation coming in and for others there have been comments that highlight weaknesses they can fix in the coming months.

Feel free to follow us on Linkedin and Facebook for further updates and if you haven't already then sign up to receive email updates as they happen.