AirVenture Schedule

[Hal Bryan]

Hi Howard - Thanks for the detailed and insightful feedback.

A few quick responses - forgive me if I don't have the time to go into any greater detail, but it's just that time of year...!

1. The performance of the web application is dialup speed when adding to my itinerary. I hate to imagine why so I won't speculate. When it finally says it added to my itinerary there is no obvious way to return to where I was in the list. Yes, I know that a simple "back" works, but good application design does not hide navigation.

We're investigating the performance issues, and have plans to improve the navigation. Unfortunately, this feature took a lot longer to complete than our development partner anticipated, so we elected to launch it sooner than later; launching it with optimized performance and navigation would do no good if it doesn't happen until August. This was a simple case of the ever-present compromise in software. Better have something that's usable, if a bit slow, than nothing at all, with plenty of time to improve and respond to feedback after convention.

2. I can't find a way to print the entire schedule or a query result. Personally, I would not do that, but my friend Jack Norris asked me how to do it and I could not.

While you can print your personal itinerary, there is no way to print all of the thousands of events in the calendar. This isn't something we considered to be a reasonable user scenario. Anyone who wants a hard copy can get one for free in our Visitors Guide or in the daily AirVenture Today newspaper.

3. The search is not working very well. I could not find anything under Jack's last name or "propellers" or "propellors" and yet there are four forums with that last name, two from Jack and two from Joe. The iPhone app finds them. There are even more with the prop subject.

I can't reproduce this problem - the searches work properly for me, except when searching for "propellors" - the search doesn't support alternative spellings, and our style guide dictates that we use the common and accepted "propeller." Otherwise, as I said, the searches you suggested are working fine for me.

4. The iPhone app is much better but I see from the comments above that it has issues, too. That app appears to come from Sporty's and I welcome their assistance but EAA should do better on their official site.

There's really only one issue outlined, and that is that the forum times aren't displayed in the master list, just in the details for the individual item. This is a feature that was added in the update that is in the queue, currently waiting for Apple to start their approval process. Also, just FYI, while Sporty's developed the app last year and the year before, this year they're supporting us as a sponsor, and we're doing the app ourselves along with a software vendor.

5. The "old" application also mentioned above does not seem to be accessing all of the same data. I can't begin to think why but I don't think that is how it should be.

This isn't true. The app draws from the exact same database as the web. The only difference is that the app stores the data offline (which is a must have requirement on the convention grounds) so it is only as current as the most recent update - we're planning on pushing updates frequently over the next couple of weeks, then just as needed during the event, hopefully no more than twice a day to minimize user annoyance with the notifications.

EAA should use basic IT quality control to ensure that anything that should not be seen is not seen. This means having a good development environment with development, test and "production" environments. Only the production environment should be visible to the public.

That's exactly what we've done. Personally, I spent more than 10 years in Test Engineering at the largest software company in the world, leading teams, training software testers, authoring best practices, etc. Obviously, we knew that the performance of the itinerary piece wasn't ideal, but, as I said, better something usable now, than to wait until August for something "perfect" (not that there's any such thing in software...) We have the three environments just as you laid out, and only the production environment is visible to the public. I can't imagine why you're implying otherwise.

Last year's stuff should be deleted if it is not supposed to be there.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

The search function should default to full text on title, presenter and subject at a bare minimum.

It does.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Regards,

Hal