Your feedback is working wonders…here’s how.

By Will Marshall - Director of Performance Based Group and BECODE

If you’ve been following BECODE’s journey for a while, you’ll know that we’re big on feedback. We ask for feedback in every email update, throughout our website and of course we have our simple feedback function in BECODE itself, which is always in the same place so it’s easy to find. We believe that your feedback will be huge part of building a successful tool and making good on our promise to deliver you speed, flexibility and options in building compliance.

Of course, feedback is useless unless you know how to respond to it. We’ve been quietly collating, discussing and working on the feedback we’ve received about BECODE over the past three months, and finally, we’ve released our first update with this feedback in mind. Here are the three key pieces of feedback we received from our users about BECODE, and how we’ve responded to them with our latest update.

BECODE needed more power

If there’s one thing we’ve discovered whilst collecting this feedback, it’s that our customers are pretty innovative when it comes to thinking about the future. From occupancy calculators, being able to more effectively filter their project specific building code and wondering how it can be used to gauge future fire safety and building maintenance requirements, our users made it clear that they wanted MORE.

We already had an occupancy calculator in the works, but we moved that up the list and made it a priority feature. It’s now live, and you can find out how to use it here. We’ve also introduced new ways to filter your project specific building code in this update. In filtering by building block, you’re able to narrow your focus onto the important information for each section of your building.

As for some of those other ideas you mentioned…stay tuned.

The user interface was ‘average’.

In our feedback survey, our user interface scored an average of 5/10 from our users. In addition to the internal feedback (the feedback that you enter through BECODE’s internal feedback function) and the questions we received about navigation, we heard loud and clear that our user interface needed work.

So, our design team came together and made some small but effective changes to the layout. It’s been simplified, scaled down and made more interactive so that you can use it more intuitively. It may not be something we perfect in our first update, but rest assured, we’ll keep adjusting this until our users tell us it’s working for them.

BECODE wasn’t reliable enough

We received an email from a user saying that BECODE had produced a ‘Type C’ construction instead of a ‘Type B’, and that given this mistake, he simple wouldn’t be able to rely on it to form a basis for a BCA assessment.

“Fair enough,” we say!

We’re very confident about the technical backing and domain knowledge that BECODE has built into it. We weren’t concerned that the knowledge BECODE was built on had been wrong, but it become more and more clear to us that BECODE’s coding wasn’t conveying this reliably enough, and that those pesky bugs were really affecting our users’ experiences. So, we made some drastic changes on BECODE’s back-end.

Switching servers, upping security, re-coding and changing logic was a mammoth task for our development team. It’s also given us the annoying outcome of needing all our users to reset their passwords. However, the security and reliability of BECODE is one of the most important aspects of what we do, so we’d rather be safe (and secure) than sorry. If you need a hand resetting your password, contact us.

Now that we’ve made those changes, we have less bugs, and the bugs we do have are being resolved at a faster rate than ever before, making BECODE’s project specific building code output more reliable.

Collaboration makes it better for everyone

By collaborating with our users, collecting their feedback and listening to it, we know that we’ve improved BECODE for the better. There is still a way to go, but we’ve been able to form a solid development timeline for the next 12 months that will bring powerful features and capabilities that you’ve prioritised.

What do you think of our updates? Is there something that you would like to see that we haven’t included? Join the conversation here, or if you wish to give us some feedback anonymously, you can click here.