a4xrbj1 wrote: I'm switching between both editors all the time, copying the permalinks (tedious) from one to to ...

1. Corrupted segments and junctions. Sometimes it happens that the map is 100% correct in Cartouche but the routing fails with the message "Routing server internal error" or similar. We have no way to detect the problem or tell what caused this. Of course this is a software bug but we have no workaround for this.
2. Voice prompts are hardly predictable. When editing we have no feedback about what the voice prompt will be at a junction. In most cases it is obvious but sometimes we get unexpected "keep left/right" messages and we notice it only when driving. Also there is a problem of the "at the roundabout take the 0th exit" message. With current long map rebuild period it may take months of our hard work (yes, we are working hard on the maps!) before some junctions are tuned perfectly. It would be much easier if the map editor gave us some hints when editing or as a minimum if the rules of the voice prompts were documented. There were already some comments from the waze staff about the difference between "keep left/right" and "turn left/right" and why some roundabouts say "take the nth exit" while some say "turn left/right/continue straight" but I find them incomplete because I have already noticed that the street name and type also seem to matter.

a4xrbj1 wrote:

noam wrote:Just to be clear - the routing server performance IS being worked on. We are working on better distribution and scaling of the server. We don't have an ETA on it but it obviously keeps us up at night (literally)

Noam,

it's not only the routing server performance. For months now I get no learning from the routing. Every time during the day Waze is trying to calculate the silly route to drive to KLCC in Kuala Lumpur, which isn't my daily and I only drive there once in a while. Yet, I drive almost daily to work and back home using probably 3-4 different routes depending on traffic. Guess what, Waze routing server is only giving me one route if I enter either work or home as target and it's in many cases not the fastest one.

I've checked the routes, they're all connected but it seems the learning has stopped. Probably due to the infrastructure as well.

But what is a routing software worth if it doesn't route? Still your no 1 problem is that you guys have retention rate similar to Zynga, hardly users stay longer than a couple of days, you're lucky if the stay more than 1 month.

That's what needs to be addressed as otherwise your potential prospects are all burned by a bad user experience in the first place. And I know quite a bit about that as I'm responsible for our 12+ million paying users here at the no 2 Telco in Malaysia, in my role as SVP of Customer Value Management. If we wouldn't had developed a proper welcome program, followed by a proper cross/upsell our clients would be fleeing in the same way as it happens with new Wazers. Where is your customer lifecycle program? How are you guiding the user from lifestage to lifestage? Where's your prediction of attrition from the user, do you react to changes and decline in daily usage? No, nothing (probably as you don't have anybody who a) has a clue about that and b) you didn't even know that it's important.

A large percentage of them is leaving as they don't find anything on the map, not their destination nor their current position. That's due to the map not well deployed. That's due because your company doesn't place enough emphasis on supporting new users by creating a welcome program. How do you react to the fact that a new user is starting at a location where there is no map yet? Where's your tutorial to react to this event and turn maybe the bulldozer on for him? How do you communicate at all to new users, to react to different events? Just giving them points for their first update request send isn't good enough. You have to react automatically to it with the right explanation/tutorial. Go and play any Zynga game on Facebook and you will understand how perfectly they take care of their new joiners and keep them connected to their game. What do you do?

Then your gamification approach isn't working for two reasons. One is the most obvious one, no points or not getting what is promised (+100 points) as the user fulfills his part (like first week you drive 2 days) is a complete turn-off point and as mentioned by dohartman is another main reason for leaving after just coming on board. The second thing is that incentifying with extrinsic motivators only works for a certain period of time (see Foursquare as the perfect example how quickly Badges and Leaderboard/Points wear off) and even leading to less usage/fun which is called overjustification. So you need to find a way that the intrinsic motivation (like for me building something that is potentially saving gasoline by being able to avoid jams and taking the fastest route, therefore saving our planet and some lives along the way as no jams means also less accidents) is replacing the extrinsic motivation to climb up your leaderboard. The intrinsic motivation is the pleasure of beating the obstacles on our way to home/work by using Waze to avoid the jams, being faster, being smarter than those not using it. Yet, you're not communicating to the user on that intrinsic motivation to connect him further to Waze (like "Congratulations, by using this route suggested by Waze rather than your standard route you arrived 5 minutes earlier!").

Lastly, focusing on crowdsourcing is a great idea but it's worth nothing if your users don't get it (hardly any of the new users understand that they are responsible for building the map) and if you're not focusing as well on helping your superusers (like us in the Top 15 worldwide with all more than 150000 edits) to build up that map. The same rule applies like in many other internet based apps (like Twitter eg), 90% is passive, 10% is active and less than 1% is doing 90% of the work!

But yet we're bothered on each of those 150000 edits with the software being buggy and not supporting us in how we spend our free, unpaid time! We still have to switch between the old Cartouche (for seeing update requests) and the new Papyrus as we eg clear stray roads left by bad GPS reception (as deleting them is much faster on Papyrus vs the one after the other deleting on Cartouche). Same for working on update requests, finding errors in the road segments.

Not even speaking about not giving us any proper communication tool to interact with the endusers, on their update request. Hence 90% of them is useless as there is no comment and we have no time to spent 5-10 minutes figuring out why something was reported (and often wrongly classified as eg missing bridge). I setup a Facebook page on "Waze in Malaysia" which has 177 engaged users but getting them there is a nightmare as your tool is missing the communication part between users (and don't tell me to use the PM system here, it's a nightmare as well).


You see Noam, there's a lot more that can be done, a lot more that can be done better but after now more than 2 years it's time to get your act together. Upgrading the infrastructure is actually hygiene, not even worth to talk about and it should work (but we accept some glitches as it's a free service). You have more than 4 million email addresses from former users (assuming all of them registered), that's the perfect basis to start your Customer Lifecycle Program!


Hope this lengthy post is helping making Waze better, I haven't fully given up on you guys after my rant a couple weeks ago but I almost stopped all work. I've overcome some of my frustration and I'm willing to help again in my sparse free time, as it somehow relaxes me from the stress at work to work on map edits (another intrinsic motivation BTW). I just don't know how long my patience lasts.

Cheers,

Andreas
Country Manager for Malaysia and Singapore (and Brunei it seems)

ricardowec wrote:I doubt you ever close the gap between the US and the world. US and Canada is your "world" and the rest, particularly Latin America where Google does not navigate, is, as you say, in a different second-class infraestruture and hence your attention is also neglected.

In my area the map has not been updated in the past year. The Waze "map as you drive" does don't work in this part of the world. The pointing system gets updated if somebody reminds you to do so.

Android is another issue you overlook in spite of your repeating "COMING SOON". It has been almost three months since you released the revamped iPHONE version and Android still "coming soon". I think you are unaware that the iPhone has lost more than 30% marketshare in the past year whereas Android has gained more than 25. Just don't understand your direction and Directors

a4xrbj1 wrote:

gettingthere wrote:Andreas - excellent post!

You are absolutely correct that if Waze want's to be successful, they need to focus on retaining users. Of course the infrastructure working correctly is critical to keeping users engaged and using the product.

Also, great points regarding Waze needing to reach out to the 1% of the users doing 90% of the map editing work. The new Cartouche is great, but really needs to be finished up. The periodic slow downs in the editor as well as the very frustrating road layer not updating that occurs from time to time needs to be resolved. And as you say, the improved Update Request mechanism needs to be deployed - promised many times, but not yet delivered.

Patience is needed though. Waze needs to clear the nagging infrastructure issues that they are currently focusing on.

Thanks for the positive feedback and reinforcement. Yet I believe the infrastructure improvements are hygiene, anybody is expecting the server to be up and give him a route, not an error message it can't calculate right now.

A service that isn't working is worth nothing, we're experiencing this here in Malaysia with our massive broadband demand. You can't use it, it's worth nothing and will be worth nothing even if you give it for free, that's feedback from our customer but I think Waze users think the same.

Problem is that people working on the Internet think that acquisition is basically 7 billion prospects, the total world population. It's not and I do think that after two years or more in operation Waze could have been way more successful if they had intended to work on retaining customer from the beginning on, not just focusing on acquiring them and then do nothing when they lose them after 5 minutes.

But Noam is the CEO and making the calls here

Just my two cents worth,

Andreas

eshabtai wrote:We appreciate your feedback, the good and the bad. It is obvious by just reading your comments that all of you are very passionate about waze and would like to see it deliver on its promise. This kind of feedback (especially the things you feel are not working properly) is very helpful and will be taken into consideration as we prioritize our plans.

As for some of the questions:
- Our routing servers are currently running under capacity. We still have some slow paths which may affect the response time but the service should be stable. We do have some work we're doing on improving the tiles replacement when we update the map every few days so in that period of time you may see some issues (timeout, broken routes). This is being worked on. But in general I'm not aware of any issues. So if you constantly get timeouts or broken routes every day, please post about it (with details on the time and route).
- We know that the new cartouche backend is not stable and we're working on it. Some of the issues will only be solved after we rebuild all the cache. We'll update when that process is done. It would be helpful if you could start a thread and just note the time and the issue you're having. We are monitoring most aspects of the backend which should automatically notify us when issues arise, but we might be missing something.

Thanks again,

Ehud

dmcconachie wrote:I'm confused by this as I haven't seen any comment promising a new BB version. In fact I'm pretty sure they said nothing but serious bugs will be fixed now and no new version will be coming in the foreseeable future!?