SpotMaker said:
Not at all. I wasn't even haunting the site to see if it changed to include anything I suggested. I appreciate your heads up that there's a new feature. I also wish Globalstar would have a staffer become a member here to engage in this discussion with us. But we certainly appreciate your being here, and I'm not confused about who you work for.
The SPoT website, like every site on the web, will be a work in progress forever.
Understood. But I was bringing up the Delorme forums as an excellent example of engaging with the customer base, announcing new features, requesting feedback. There are many, many worse GPS vendors out there. I was hoping Globalstar could be more like Delorme than the others.
There are many enhancements being worked on, and others being discussed.
I assume that it's a continuous process. I manage Customer Support for a semiconductor equipment manufacturer ($300-500K systems) and one of the requirements of the job is managing the bug list and feature request queue, and communicating the roadmap to the customer base so they see what's coming. It's a much more transparent process, and the Globalstar model of accepting feature requests and rolling them out without announcement is the opaque model. Customers seem to prefer a model with some visibility into it. But since you're an outsider to that team, as am I, anything we speculate on is just guessing.
You sound like you're taking it personally that some suggestions that you made weren't implemented instantly. Many of them are likely coming.
I sure didn't mean to come across that way, but when I submit a dozen suggestions, and only one obvious one gets done, what way should I express frustration? For instance, I *still* can't login to my account using my Moto Q phone with IE Mobile, due to its requirement for Javascript. I even tried with Opera Mobile with Javascript, and it still failed to let me log in.
I can buy stocks, airline tickets, and check traffic on my phone, but Globalstar can't make an accessible login page? The site also appears to ignore any hint of disabled accessibility, but if I can't use a mobile browser I didn't even want to remind them to accommodate the visually disabled.
Again, I work for Axonn, the manufacturer of the orange piece of hardware. My contact with the web-designing people is best described as "indirect", but I know that a number of new web features are under development and/or test.
We remember, or at least I do, and I really, really love the product, as does my wife who used to worry a lot more about my trips. As long as the 911 feature works well, the rest of it is just fluff - but it's fluff we paid extra to get, and Globalstar is making it difficult to use.
As a reminder to myself, here's my last list of suggestions:
Feature requests for track mode:
a) Messages aren't numbered (1, 2, 3) in the list.
b) Messages aren't numbered in a readable way if they overlap on the map when the SPOT isn't moving. The font for the number (white) is small and can't be seen well on a white background.
c) When you hit the pop-up box on a message, they aren't numbered either so it's hard to correlate with the list.
d) Really annoying while tracking an expedition in progress: hits are being RENUMBERED from most recent backwards, so the list is unusable from hit to hit. They should be numbered from oldest to newest, and never renumbered once added to the list
e) Resetting the list numbering would be useful to separate different trips. Somehow they are being reset now for a new trip (maybe a new day?), but it's not clear what the criteria are.
f) Time should be a choice of GMT or local time zones.
g) The Google map display has no LAT/LONG lines or distance scale.
h) I see you can resort the list by clicking in the header. Would be best if the default sort order was indicated somewhere as "sorted by latest time - change it by clicking in the header"
i) I'd like to see a "data export" button to send the selected data to a CSV or TXT file (or some common GPS waypoint formats) for importing to a spreadsheet or to share with other GPS users.
j) And as we previously discussed, a way to view tracks for users other than the owner of the account.
So from November 19 to now, I got one wish out of ten on new features, no communication on acceptance or rejection of the suggestions, and still can't login without dragging out a full-size computer with a browser they support. I don't take it personally, and I understand our needs could be different from other user populations like racing teams, kayakers, or private pilots, but I claim that sending suggestions into a black hole that just absorbs them is a frustrating exercise.
