Kaitlyn Orred
When it comes to sending informational and emergency messages, it’s likely that your communication plan doesn’t fit into a typical 9-5 schedule. Whether you’re a business owner trying to alert your staff of inclement weather or a school administrator needing to notify parents of a school closure, time is of the essence. Even if you’re able to schedule and send many of your messages from your laptop, contacts often ask questions that require a quick response while you’re on the go, emergency situations wait for no one, and sometimes it’s just convenient to be able to send mass messages from your mobile device.
With all this in mind, we’ve been dedicating significant time and effort in the last few months to improving the mobile experience of our service. Some of the major updates we’ve already made include completely re-vamping the responsiveness of our website so that it’s easily accessible from your mobile device and eliminating issues that were causing our users trouble on our mobile app.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the changes we’ve made, how to access them, and what to expect from our team in terms of mobile development in the years to come.
Our Mobile Website
Until recently, our desktop website was not responsive, and our customers couldn’t use the website from their mobile devices. To solve the issue, we created a website specifically for mobile devices that was accessible through the link: m.text-em-all.com. While this website provided basic functionality for our customers, we always had the goal to make our desktop website accessible by mobile for consistency across platforms for our users and to give our users the full capability of all our features on the go instead of just a select few.
To achieve this goal, we started by making all of our desktop web pages responsive to mobile devices. You'll see below that our home screen is much easier to understand in the updated version, and it's simple and intuitive to find all the features you use from your desktop.
You'll notice the mobile Create Broadcast experience has also been improved and looks much more familiar. You'll now go through the same steps as you would on your desktop. With this update, you can now add images to your text broadcasts from your mobile device. Additionally, instead of calling in to record your voice broadcast, you can record your message directly from your phone. Our text signatures, text surveys, and text-to-speech features are now available from here as well.
The message library has also gotten a facelift, and you can now view your entire message library in one place instead of having to visit two separate libraries to see your text and audio broadcasts. Additionally, text templates are now accessible from your mobile message library, which wasn't available in the previous version.
Our Mobile App
As many of our users know, we have a mobile app available to both our Apple and Android users on the App Store and Google Play. Our mobile app was designed specifically to serve as a conversational app, similar to the one already installed on your phone, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger. When a contact responds to one of your text broadcasts, you'll receive a push notification on your phone, allowing you to immediately view and respond if needed. From the app, you can craft your responses on the go, send messages to individuals, and mark conversations as done. Any changes made to two-way conversational threads will be synced with your online account. This mobile app is a fantastic compliment to the full functionality now existing on our mobile site, and rounds out our mobile development so that you truly can "do-it-all" from your phone.
While we were making the improvements to our mobile website, we also put around 10 months of work into improving the stability and performance of our mobile app, in addition to a variety of bug fixes. While many of these aren't as "flashy" as some of the feature updates you'll see on the mobile website, all of these improvements will significantly improve your experience while using the app.
Some of the improvements we made include:
- Added support for the latest devices from Apple and Android - most significantly, the iPhone 14
- Big improvements in stability for users who use the app's search features. Specifically, searching for conversations and searching for text numbers (for users who have more than 5 text numbers)
- Improved stability when managing MMS images, especially on Android phones
- Increased ability for the Text-Em-All team to diagnose in-app issues quickly
- Improved reliability of data updates when network connections are unstable or intermittent
Our vision for the future of mobile
As we look to the future, listening to our users will truly be the foundation of our mobile strategy. Our vision is simple: to provide an exceptional mobile experience that addresses the evolving needs of our customers.
To live out this commitment to putting our users first, we have a variety of channels our users can share their ideas with us, including our Feedback Forum, NPS, G2, Trustpilot, and mobile app reviews, and speaking directly to one of our Customer Experience Specialists. From there, we go through valuable, development-focused responses we receive as a company each week, and this helps shape the direction our team takes our product. From optimizing the user interface to enhancing performance and introducing new features, we think critically about what would be most beneficial to our users as we consider our product development options.
The mobile landscape is constantly evolving, with new technologies and trends rapidly coming into the software space. While our goal is to stay at the forefront of these advancements, we're primarily focused on making sure our platform remains relevant, accessible, and enjoyable for our users.
If you ever have any questions, want to let us know what you think about our new features, or suggest future additions to our platform, we're here to listen!
Visit our Product Feedback Forum.