Update 24: What we’ve built since you started testing (and what’s next)

First, a huge thank you to everyone who has been testing Good Ways and telling us how you’re finding it. We’re listening to all of it, and it’s shaping our thinking and how we build.

Easier editing for everyone

We’re still at an early stage in the development of Good Ways, and that’s what makes this so exciting. We’re new, and we’re building quickly. Small nudges now can have huge impacts on how Good Ways looks in the future.

A big theme of the feedback lately has been looking at the whole flow of Good Ways and shaping it up: taking what began as a bunch of different features, and making them work together smoothly to help with finding, following and creating routes. We’re not there yet, but we know we can do better, and these changes are steps along the way:

• Better route editing. From fully supporting uploading GPX files to being able to interact and reroute individual legs of a route, the route creation flow has been transformed over the last month. A huge thanks to James W for the feedback on wanting off-route segments, which led to this change.
• Revision history. Routes now keep a history of how they’ve changed. More on why this matters below.
• Sharing links. This one solved a frustration I have: my wife often creates a route for us, and it’s not easy for her to share it with me. When viewing your route, you can now create a link that will grant access to anyone with the link.
• Miles or kilometres. You are now able to choose if you want to use Good Ways in miles or kilometers. I’ve always used kilometers, but my family stick with miles, which has led to plenty of confusion. A shout out to my Dad for complaining about this – now we don’t have to pick one or the other!

There’s also a very long tail of smaller tweaks that all came from you using it and telling us what bugged you. We still have improvements to make, especially where the website meets the app, but we’re getting there.

The app

Over the last month, Richard has been hard at work making sure the app is as performant and smooth as possible. We’ve got some big plans in the works for the app. You can get a sneak preview of these plans on our new public roadmap later on.

One of these improvements we’re about to release is the ability to pause and then resume a recording: meaning you can explore other routes and close the app without worrying about losing your progress.

Why route history is so important

Once a route is published, we keep a record of how it develops over time. Routes aren’t fixed things. People change how they travel, new paths open, old ones close, and a good route should be able to keep up. Having history from day one means we can keep that data safe and shareable, and nothing is lost by accident.

Not only can you feel safe in editing your route knowing we have your back if you change your mind, but it acts as a living, breathing history of how we travel around our communities, and how that changes over time. You can always turn off route history if you don’t want to record when changes were made.

Built for organisations too

One of the things I’m most excited about is embeddable maps. If your organisation would like to share your favourite routes, you can benefit from all the features Good Ways has to offer, but without asking members to leave your website! Here’s what it looks like for Slow Ways, where this all started.

If you run an organisation and you think this could be useful, get in touch!

We’re all ears

I read every piece of feedback that comes in, and I reply wherever I can. What we can act on shapes our plans, and the bigger-picture items go on our public roadmap. It’s deliberately light and will change, because we’re a small team. If your idea isn’t on there, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t heard. It’s also a good place to vote and influence the order we do things in.

Keep the feedback coming on Featurebase, or just comment below.

Thank you for building this with us.

Toby