The first thing we learnt from our users
Saturday, January 09, 2010
was that we didn’t really know what they wanted. Not really.
Since releasing Clocks and Clocks Lite we’ve been receiving (inundated would be far too strong a word here, unfortunately) lots of requests to incorporate named time zones into the apps.
When we were designing the apps, we thought about including these but ruled it out because we were worried that somebody would set a clock to, say, GMT for time in the UK and then wonder why it was wrong for half of the year when British cities went to BST. Much better, we reasoned, to restrict the choices to Cities and then things like daylight savings time would be seamless.
Whoops, first lesson, you don’t really know what people are going to want. At least not until they tell you.
Turns out, there’s 3 different set of requests that keep occurring
1) Named American time zones, like Eastern, Pacific, Central etc. Now I know any North Americans reading this may be shaking their heads wondering at our naevity in not including these in the first place, but honestly coming from a developer who’s lived most of his life in countries where there is only one time zone, having a named time zone for a whole region was a surprise.
2) People who needed to use universal time zones for their work, such as pilots, military personnel and even network comms people. Apparently at some places of work, “Zulu” time (UTC) is used to plan all activities, and local time only used to work out lunch breaks!
3) Some people send meeting requests and the like with times referenced with a zone. e.g 3pm(PST).
All of these were somewhat of a surprise to us, as none of them had ever featured in our lives before. And bear in mind we’re a small team with family and friends flung to the far corners of the globe, and so thought we were familiar with time zone issues.
Which brings up an important point, which is that you may not know what people want until you give them something else!
This is certainly one of my main issues with the Appstore, which is (certainly now, anyway) geared up for apps which are complete from day 1. Personally, I much prefer to iterate continuously to improve quality over time, and this is also the best way IMHO to figure out what features your users actually need.Well, if we didn’t know as much as we thought at the start, at least we know a bit more now!
Anyway, the latest update of Clocks was pushed to Apple today, and it contains the following:
- Named time zone areas for North America (Pacific, Central etc)
- All the main time zone code abbreviations (e.g GMT,PST,UTC)
- Full set of military time zones (Alpha, Bravo, Zulu etc) specifically requested by a couple of our users.
- Two new local time zones (Local and Juliet) which track the time zone of the iphone / ipod touch. If this changes, then the next time you open the app this will be reflected in the local time.
If anyone does have any more requests for these apps, please let us know. We won’t promise to implement them, but we always listen.
And fingers crossed we don’t receive a ton of complaints come the Summer that GMT time isn’t correct for London…