Early Feedback from the Causelink Mobile Beta Release

When I started using my iPhone’s voice to text features last year, I realized how much easier data entry could be during a root cause analysis investigation.  RCA teams spend a lot of time typing notes from meetings or visits to the shop floor, and trying to remember what happened out in the field.  With voice to text functionality improving with each update, there had to be a better way to get your information into a report and ready to share with your team.

After we released Causelink Enterprise last year, the Sologic development team began working on a mobile prototype that takes advantage of the REST web services we had already built out for the Enterprise system.  Since our www.sologic.com stats show there are 4 times as many visitors using mobile phones than tablets, we decided to focus our efforts on smartphone use cases.  

Goals for the Alpha release in April of 2015 were to prove that the mobile site would perform well under normal bandwidth conditions and to provide the ability to upload images and videos taken from an end user’s phone.  The Alpha release definitely met these goals, culminating in a demo at Sologic headquarters as the global partners watched a photo taken from my phone get quickly uploaded to the Enterprise system and projected on screen. 

We paused development over the summer of 2015 to overhaul our website and to complete an update to Causelink Enterprise.  This fall, we re-started the project with the following goals for the Mobile Beta version:

Prove that voice to text makes data entry faster
Improve user interaction for uploading photos & videos
Make action tracking and completion of items easier 

We definitely ran into some hiccups along the way, including a finding that iOS ships the Safari browser with local storage turned off, which prevented us from saving any data – that was a big blocker!  However, lead developer Brandon Prudent found a terrific work-around and we were back on track within 24 hours.   

With the release of Causelink Mobile Beta on October 27, 2015, we continue our focus on developing innovative software that improves your problem solving efforts.  We are scheduled to receive Beta feedback at the end of next week and I am looking forward to seeing the results.   Early feedback indicates that the ability to talk your way through data gathering will be a game changer for many companies.  If this is true, including Mobile in the standard Causelink Enterprise package certainly helps make the business case that this software is a must-have for organizations serious about solving problems. 

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