GateGuru 3.0 - App Store Update Coming Soon
To the GateGuru community,
The past 48 hours have been humbling to say the least. We have received close to a thousand emails, tweets, App Store reviews, Facebook comments and other forms of communication. While we expected a vocal welcome to GateGuru 3.0, we thought it would be overwhelmingly positive. It was not. While some users (especially new users or those that use GateGuru for flight tracking) loved the new interface and experience, many other users were clearly and immediately upset at the removal of the ability to search by airport, without entering flight information.
While the negative reaction to GateGuru 3.0 was an incredible disappointment to us, we recognize the need to make things right. So the short of it is that we are working on an update to GateGuru 3.0 that will include the ability to quickly and easily search by airport, without entering any flight information. We hope to have it submitted and approved by Apple in the coming few weeks.
While I still have you here, I would like to impart a bit of background and insight into GateGuru 3.0. This was a product that we spent about 9 months working on. The decision to remove the ability to search by airport was one that we had a lot of internal debate on. Ultimately, we felt that we could provide a much better and more consistent user experience for travelers by having them provide us with flight information. A few reasons why we landed on this side of the coin:
- In the old version, we presented over 200 airports to a user - realistically, as a user you only care about 1 - 3 airports that they are going through as part of your journey. This was not a great user experience.
- Additionally, many users often knew their airport, but didn’t know their arrival or departure terminal (we often get support emails about this). This made GateGuru much more cumbersome for finding information quickly.
- In the new version, once a users enters their flight information, we are able to tell you the airports, terminals, maps, and amenities that are relevant to your particular flight. In our testing and interviews, this was a really powerful and magical experience. Based on this, it made much more sense to us to present this customized, personalized, push-based flow.
- We felt that we made the process of entering flight information pretty seamless. If you didn’t want to manually enter your flight information, an even easier way to locate airport amenities in your terminal is register with GateGuru and email us your itinerary (plans@gateguruapp.com) and then we do all of the heavy lifting of figuring out your airports, terminals, amenities, maps, etc. (and matching all of those pieces up using our proprietary database). You can also bring your itineraries into GateGuru by connecting to Tripit or KAYAK. Once you had any of these automatic ways setup, the user experience with GateGuru 3.0 is so much more powerful than previous versions.
At the end of the day, removing the ability for a user to search by airport was too extreme. While pulling in all of a user’s day-of travel information may be the right experience long-term, we need to allow users to have access of their day-of travel information in the way that they want it.
All of this being said, it was amazing to see the outflow of passion for the GateGuru product. Going from a small idea to a product that has a significant impact on how people experience their day-of travel is truly humbling. We hope to have the updated version of GateGuru 3.0 out in a week or two and we hope that you will come back and enjoy the powerful 3.0 user interface, while enjoying the ability to look up airports without entering any flight information.
Thanks for your time and continued support,
Dan
GateGuru Co-Founder and CEO
PS - Feel free to continue to email us at support[at]gateguruapp[dot]com, or you can email me directly at dan[at]gateguruapp[dot]com. We appreciate any thoughts, ideas, comments, etc.
