What an incredible first week! We launched Visible’s open beta on Monday, and in that time more than 5,000 people have already started testing the app. This is massive progress towards our mission of making invisible illness visible, and we couldn’t be more pleased.
People living with ME (and now Long Covid) have been neglected for too long, and we strongly believe that Visible is a huge opportunity to pool our knowledge, data and voices together to move our understanding of these conditions forward.
I’m grateful to everyone that has generously offered their precious energy to help us test the Visible beta app and provide their feedback on what we’ve built. We have a lot of work to do over the coming months, and this feedback is so important to help us build a platform which is specifically designed with our conditions in mind.
Building in public
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of ‘Building in public’ with Visible. This is one of our first posts to respond to some of the frequent questions and feedback we’ve received so far, and also share what we’re working on next.
Top 5 feedback points
International availability
At launch, Visible was available in the following countries: US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia.
We chose these countries because they had the most sign-ups on our waitlist… and because our 1 person support team (hi Ed!) only speaks English!
But we want to make Visible available to as many people as possible, as soon as possible. That’s why since Monday, we have added Austria, Germany, Norway, Netherlands and Mexico to the list.
Rolling out internationally is resource intensive, but it’s something we want to do more of. We'll send updates via Twitter and email as we make Visible available in additional countries in the coming months.
Log-in issues
We’ve had a few people getting stuck signing up via email, specifically, the button on the ‘Sign up’ email wasn’t working as reliably as we’d hoped! This affected a few hundred (very patient) people.
We’ve now added a back-up option that will email a code you can use to sign-up to the app. If this affects you, make sure you’ve got the latest app update.
Wearable data
We don’t currently support HRV data from Apple Health or Garmin and this is something a lot of people have asked for.
We are working on Visible Plus, our wearable integration in the background, and we'll be sharing more about this soon via our blog.
Morning check-in
We’ve had multiple reports of users having issues with their Morning check-in being low-quality or not completing, and we’ve confirmed this in our error logs.
We’re working hard to investigate this. So far, it looks to be the newer Samsung and Google Phones (particularly the Pixel 6 and 7) that are most likely to be affected. This issue is likely a larger one for us to fix, and is one of our highest priorities.
Color scheme
When we initially designed Visible we had light sensitivity in mind and so picked a darker colour scheme. We have however had some messages that light text on a dark background isn’t always best for everyone. Similarly our transitions from dark to white within the app are jarring. We now have an accessibility review of the app planned for early next year.
What else are we working on?
We have had a lot of requests for other features, and have narrowed them down to the following four that we’re working on over the next few weeks:
- Free-form notes
- Medication tracking
- Crashes tracking
- Updated Morning Pace score algorithm
We’ll be doing this in parallel to working on Visible Plus (our wearable integration), which we’re currently testing with our Founding100.
Your support
I hope this post show’s how important your messages and feedback are to us in building Visible. Please keep them coming! We read every single one and they all help us to build the platform that we badly need.
You can get in touch with us either from the in-app ‘Help and Feedback’ section or email us directly at info@makevisible.com
On behalf of the whole team, I want to say thank you for supporting this launch. We’re working hard on new and improved versions of Visible coming soon, and are looking forward to getting another step closer to making invisible illness, visible.
Onwards,
Harry
