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Published Sep 10, 2021

New Ideas

Navigraph Team

If you were to walk down the street in Old Town Stockholm were Navigraph has it’s offices you would see that the big windows facing the street now have lots and lots of small colorful notes arranged in rows and columns according to some indecipherable system. On each of these notes there is new creative idea for how to develop the flight simulation community and give Navigraph users more useful software. These bright neon clusters of PostIts is the output of the last two days of workshop held by the Navigraph Team.

It has been little over a month since Navigraph launched its new Charts software. The dust has now settled and it seems like all systems are still go. Everything is running on Amazon Web Services and scales up and down according to demand and should be able to take the surge of enthusiastic first time users. Moreover, the launch was preceded by a pretty extensive beta testing period for each product. Thank you very much to all volunteers for finding the small and not so small bugs. Below is a picture from launch date on the 5th of September as the developer team is monitoring the system and the first couple of users. (The big 0 is the number of exceptions thrown by the system at the moment.)

With the launch of the new Charts, we delivered on many of the requests submitted via the survey of April 2016 which had 2,200 respondents. The survey gave us a lot of important data to guide our development. In particular, there was a free text comments field where you were asked to write freely about future development. We, somewhat painstakingly, read through all these comments are tried to categorize them into specific requests. Below is the resulting histogram.

The requests, from left to right, were:

1. Increased charts coverage

We are very happy with the results we achieved with the release of new Charts. We did increase charts coverage (1) by moving over to Jeppesen (2). Switching provider enabled us to create Moving Maps (4) and provide a Night Mode (21) color scheme. While reworking the Charts software, we added Flights (7), Pinboard (10) and route visualization (8).

Already last summer we started updating Charts once a month (13). We have continuously revised prices and our business model to address requests 3 and 6.

In the backlog for the development ahead is VFR charts (5) and to display charts inside of the simulator (15).

However, before getting started on 5 and 15 we would like to see if there were no other prioritized tasks that need to be done first (aside from the running support and maintenance tasks of course). This request list is, after all, nearly 18 months old. This is the reason for our workshop and for also working on the 2017 edition of the Navigraph FlightSim Community Survey.

The first stages of a Navigraph workshop is not much different from a group of friends sitting down chatting about what to do next. “-This would be fun. -I think we should do that. -I have read in the forums that users want this.” These ideas end up on PostIt notes.

The next exercise is to try to expand on these ideas and by free association figure out how to develop these ideas further and how to link them with existing concepts. The more an idea develops, the longer the snake of PostIts become. This explains the long columns of colorful pieces of paper in our windows. We bet some passersby mistake these notes for backlogged issues on a Kanban board and must think “Geez, those guys are busy.” but that’s not the case - yet.

To make sure we are prioritizing the right tasks we will soon issue a Navigraph FlightSim Community Survey. We will let this survey collect your requests for a few weeks or so. By filling it out you will help guiding our developer efforts. If you want to help us even more, please send the survey link also to your friends.

The link to the survey will soon be distributed via newsletter, but also on social media and in forums.