Greetings Wazers, and thanks for joining us today for our Annual Kickoff with Waze Leads!
We had an amazing time connecting with you and answering your questions, and I can speak on behalf Neha, Gai, and Hila that they sincerely appreciated your questions, and the opportunity to share their thoughts and plans for this year with you all.
Now, on to the fun part. As Neha mentioned, we’d really appreciate your feedback into what was presented, along with any other thoughts you’d like to share.
For your reference, here is the 2022 overview that Neha presented:
High-Level Goals for 2022 Focusing our efforts on areas we know matter based on your feedback, our users and our data
Sustainability (EV and more)
App quality and reliability
In-Car technology
Gamification
Fully realizing “half-baked” features
Moving Carpool to a smaller, regional experiment to put Waze core back into focus Other Goals
Growing our active markets, and bringing in new users and editors
More Local Data and features to better support our communities Please comment below and share your feedback on what we have planned for 2022!
(I’ve posted this to the Community Forum instead of Official Announcements so that you all have a chance to comment)
We have lots of great programming in store for you this year, so make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check back here on the Announcements Forum for when we post new episode topics.
Thank you again for your amazing questions, and for making everything we do at Waze special
Here’s to an amazing 2022!
Brett, on behalf of the Waze Communities Team
Thank you for recording and letting us watch later on! Super glad to see EV was heavily mentioned and a big focus for this year. Also glad to see app reliability and gamification being talked about more. Was sad to see the friends feature depreciated and no real replacement coming but hoping the other gamification efforts make up for it
I’m also glad to see Carpool being restructured. As popular as it may be in some countries, focusing on Waze core will improve everything about Waze😃
In addition, I really appreciate planned improvements for Waze on in-car systems in order to stay competitive. I really looking forward to seeing progress in all the different fields.
I must say I’m also sad about the denial of a new friends feature, I would see it as a great opportunity for Waze to get new users and bind existing users to the plattform with many possibilities to build gamification around it. At least, I think the reasons behind the decision would be very informative for us to hear.
Lastly, I wonder whether the new Waze chat is indeed already available for all users here on the Waze forums as announced at the end of the Office Hours. I still only see the old pm system.
I heard a couple times that you hoped to provide more information to users (chat, push notifications, … ) in the app itself. However, once again, this is a feature where the car-integrated experience lags. Users who connect to AA/CP do not get in-app notifications.
(BTW: Everry part of the Waze app is designed as an in-car experience. You should distinguish, as I did, between the car-integrated experience and stand-alone experience).
I liked the subjects presented at the office hours. In the near future I hope I’ll can change the price of the electric charge of the EV stations.
I’m worried about the chat in the app, it will be dangerous if the wazers use it while they are driving or at a red light.
I want the integration of the app and Apple Car Play A.S.A.P.
Thank you for recording. I’m not often able to catch the Sunday morning live streams, but I do enjoy watching the recordings later.
I really like the concept of celebrating the editing community more openly and in the app. Many app users out there don’t realize that they can participate in improving the waze experience. If celebrating the community could somehow be incorporated more into the day-to-day use of the app, then perhaps we would see a drastic increase in participation, and a resulting increase in updated data for the map.
First of all thank you very much for the recording.
On this occasion I could not witness the call live.
It is a great detail that we receive this information directly from the hands of the Waze Heads.
I have one question.
In some call I mentioned it but I think it went unnoticed, any idea about adding the possibility of receiving badges in NFT format for the gamification plans?
Neha gave an excellent presentation of the high level goals for 2022.
I believe that bringing the In-Car - AA and CarPlay - functionality up to the level of the phone app should be the very top priority for Waze at this time.
As a Beta tester using Waze with AA pretty much exclusively for the last 3 years it has been immensely frustrating to read about many new features being introduced and tested and almost never see them in practice. :roll:
Thanks Neha, Brett, Gai, and Hila for a fantastic presentation.
While I agree that EV is important and needs work, I am not sure how much of an impact it will have on the vast majority of the users.
I would prioritize better AA/CP experience since I believe it is used by much more app users. One of the biggest issues I have with AA/CP is the lack of notifications.
If I can juggle the priority list a little bit, I think it should be more like this:
App quality and reliability: core functionality is what drives users to Waze.
In-Car technology: missing a lot of the functions that the regular app offers. It also makes it harder for editors, as we’re editing with several platforms in mind.
Fully realizing “half-baked” features: yes please! Multiple Entry Points for Android is well overdue!
Sustainability (EV and more): it would be really neat if the Waze app could automatically read out the autonomy of an electric car and chose charging stations in consequence.
Moving Carpool to a smaller, regional experiment to put Waze core back into focus: Carpooling is an important aspect of sustainability.
Gamification: should be on the bottom of the priorities list. Functionality over fun.
Thanks everyone for watching this event and for your super thoughtful and helpful feedback, PLEASE keep it coming and know that I am absolutely going to read every single comment here and will ask our leaders at Waze to do the same.
Some thoughts so far based on your comments:
I’m very happy to see what we presented as focus areas seems to resonate w/all of you.
It’s helpful to see your thoughts on relative prioritization, for example, in car progress feels critical as does a focus on app quality and reliability. EV is also clearly important.
There was a comment on NFTs- this is definitely a live discussion right now at Waze! Not sure where it’ll go but we’re thinking about it.
Seems like there’s a lot of heart for the ‘friends’ feature and at the least, a desire to understand why we are making the decisions we are in this area. I’ll make sure to educate myself on this as I’m not as familiar with the feature and the ask/rationale for decision. (@hila let me know )
100% agree on celebrating the editing community more and helping all of our users to understand how Waze comes to life. I think this will be a win all around.
…and finally, yes, will get to work on Waze socks ASAP
Please keep your feedback coming here, would love to hear from more of the Community!
2202 focus areas: I see there a big promise of positive change; I would love to see the core fixed, strengthened and than growing. I look forward to see how they galvanize into specific features.
Current Waze ambitions and strategy: These are big question marks for me… I cannot find it anywhere in the slides… Not sure if it was mentioned verbally. Where do you want to have Waze app in next few years? Should it be “the best navigation app”? Or “the most innovative navigation”? Or both? Or something else? What’s the strategy to achieve it? How do these 2022 focus-areas suport that strategy?
EVs vs. Waze: This story is a lot about driver groups awaiting the proper Waze support. EV drivers are lucky now. The question is if Waze is interested in other groups.
Other than that: It’s very good and exciting to see the change coming.
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