Month: September 2020

It’s impossible to have a discussion about 2020 without bringing up the global pandemic. 

First and foremost, allow me to take this opportunity to say that I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. I also hope that your businesses have been able to survive these unprecedented times.

With that said, we’ve seen certain app features being utilized today, more than ever before, as the result of COVID-19. Mobile apps have become a necessity for businesses of all shapes and sizes as our society shifts away from in-person contact.

I’ve highlighted a few different categories below:

Internal Business Apps

Most businesses have been forced to move out of the office (we’ve experienced this first hand here at BuildFire). With remote employees working from home, I’m sure your resources are all over the place. 

But a mobile app can drastically improve your internal business communications. You can add features for employee self-help tools, document storage, training resources, PDFs, and more. An app is a great place to add an employee directory feature as well, so your staff can easily communicate with their co-workers. 

We’ve also noticed that lots of businesses prioritize a secure login for internal apps. With BuildFire, we allow you to set up lots of different ways for who can log into your app (tags, SSO, Zapier integrations, codes, etc.).

As some businesses are returning back to the office and in-person activity, most of these organizations need a way to distribute COVID screening questionnaires for symptoms. Our Free Text Questionnaire plugin is the PERFECT way to facilitate this. Employees can answer questions from their own devices and get a score to see if it’s safe to return to work. Admins can see the scores, answers, and track results as well.

We’ve even seen businesses using this type of process for a physical check-in, as employees or customers are entering the doors to a building. The questions can be completed directly from an app.

Gym and Fitness Apps

Gyms, personal trainers, and other businesses in the fitness industry have been impacted hard by COVID-19. Some locations have been forced to close for months, and some of you might still have your doors closed. 

For the lucky ones that have been able to re-open, most states are enforcing a reduced capacity. Plus, some of your customers might be hesitant to come back in-person.

But with a fitness mobile app, there are lots of ways that you can make improvements to your existing business model with new monetization strategies. 

You can create workout programs, videos, meal plans, and sell them directly through your app. It’s also easy to sync your app with your YouTube channel and monetize those videos as well.

We’ve even seen gyms use BuildFire so their customers can book training sessions or schedule times to visit physical gym locations. 

White Label Apps

Agencies and white label resellers can also improve their services during the pandemic. 

All of the strategies and examples (for internal apps and fitness apps) listed above are great pitches for your customers. 

For starters, you can reach out to all of your current business clients and discuss the idea of creating an app for internal purposes. Next, you can reach out to any gyms and personal trainers in your region to provide them with app development services. 

You’ll be offering them with solutions to problems that they’re experiencing in real-time, so you should get a great response to this outreach approach. 

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll be dealing with the ramifications of COVID-19 for the foreseeable future. 

The businesses that learn to adapt by going digital and leveraging tools like app development are more likely to survive these tough times.

To say that 2020 has been a crazy year would be a drastic understatement. But here at BuildFire, our team has stayed busy working around the clock to improve our software and services.

In the midst of all our hard work, it recently dawned on me—we haven’t really announced any of these updates.

I initially planned to send out a newsletter highlighting our achievements, but quickly realized there was just way too much information to cram into a single email. To keep our customers in the loop with what’s happening here at BuildFire, I decided to blog about what we’ve accomplished this year.

This article contains tons of useful information about our product updates, service resources, and even information about improving your business during COVID-19.

I’m really excited to share these updates. Hope you enjoy!

New Product Updates to the BuildFire Platform

Improving our software is something we do on a daily basis. We’re always listening to feedback from our customers and finding new ways to enhance your experience. This year, we’ve made dozens of noteworthy updates. From simple UX/UI enhancements to completely new marketplace features, these updates will make your life much easier and improve the quality of your app.

With so many updates to cover, I’ve segmented them into various categories that you can scan through below.

New Marketplace Features

Our marketplace is growing. This year alone, we’ve added 15+ new features. If you haven’t noticed, make sure you log in and check out these brand new plugins:

• User Profile Action Folder

• Container Plugin

• Card Manager

• QR Code Scanner

• Menu Order System

• Folder 2.0

• Customer Feedback 2.0

• Weight Tracker

• User Directory

• Premium Social Inbox

• File Directory

No matter what type of app you’ve already launched or you’re in the process of building, I’m confident that you’ll find a good use for at least some of these new features.

Enhanced Marketplace Features

In addition to the completely new features listed above, we’ve also made some improvements to our existing marketplace plugins that you already know and love. Some noteworthy examples include:

• Free Text Questionnaire — Facelift
• Places 2.0 — Facelift
• Folder — Facelift
• Premium Social Wall — Facelift
• Media Center Manual — Deep linking support added
• Loyalty Plugin — Added the ability to earn points via products; Added results tab and language tab; Facelift
• WYSIWYG editor — Created a new theme (White Modern) and set it as the new default; Added action items functionality and image library functionality; Made all plugins available by default

Again, all of these enhancements were inspired by real feedback from our customers. So if you have any suggestions, please continue to reach out and let us know.

Control Panel Enhancements

We’ve also made lots of changes to the control panel to improve the experience for app owners and admins. Here’s a quick overview of those improvements:

• Added the ability to set or change home feature from the control menu
• Added the ability to clone features with or without data
• Utilized more space (totally updated and facelifted UI) to allow easier control of an app
• Added a new search bar in the control panel header
• Added the ability to search for marketplace features from the new search bar
• Added the ability to search for last added and last visited features from new search bar
• Made enhancements to the Image Library, including:
  • Increased image grid area
  • Added ability for drag & drop image uploads into the whole grid
  • Added option for small or large view of images
  • Added image search (giving the ability to find images by name)
  • Added functionality for image name to display on hover
  • Added ability to rename file upon uploading
  • Added ability to upload GIF and SVG images

Overall, we’re confident that these control panel enhancements will really make your life much easier as you’re building and making changes to your app on the backend.

2 Factor Authentication Automation

The 2FA automation to the publishing process is an update that we’re proud to announce. This in itself was a multiple month epic project on our end.

As a result, our customers can now get up and running in a matter of seconds, as opposed to potentially waiting days to get scheduled with someone on the BuildFire side for authentication.

Not only does this add an extra layer of security, but it also helps get your app to market faster.

Action Item Changes

We also made several significant changes to the action item functionality on our platform. All of these updates were made to reduce friction points on the admin side whenever you’re setting up a new action item.

In fact, we even ran a click-through analysis to see exactly how many clicks it takes to set up a new action item. Compared to the old system, we drastically reduced that number, so it will save you a ton of time as you’re going through this process.

As for the specifics, a handful of noteworthy action item changes include:

• We made “link to app content” the default option
• When “link to app content” option is selected, you can import plugin image, name the image icon, and add action button text
• We updated and amended the names of all action item options
• We increased the action button text limit
• We fixed button colors to match the style guidelines

All of these changes make the action items more intuitive from the admin side. You’ll notice these benefits almost immediately, the next time you create a new action item.

Other Misc. Changes

There are a few other updates I wanted to address, but they don’t really fit into any other category. The following enhancements ultimately benefit the end-users for your app:

• Intro screens — Added animation to background images and text elements
• Login screen — Added animation to background images, input elements, and buttons
• User profiles — Added animation to profile and cover images
• Navigation between plugins — Modified slide in animation with different easing and timing for a smoother feel

Think of this as the foundation for your app. These simple and subtle changes will make your app more appealing to its users.