✨Avicenna March Update: Stability and Upcoming Features

Greetings Avicenna Community,

Another month has passed. In March, we focused on making things more stable and easier to use. Your feedback helped us fix important issues, so everything runs smoother now. Plus, we've been finalizing some features in our pipeline that you might find useful. You can see a list of some upcoming features under What's Next? below.

🚀 User Experience Improvements

• Unmodifiable Anonymous Participants Properties:
  We’ve made some properties of Anonymous participants such as site, label, and participation period unmodifiable. This ensures better control and consistency across your participant data.
• Enhanced Support Escalation Process:
  We’ve enhanced the support email escalation process by guiding users through a confirmation page upon opening the escalation link. This reduces accidental escalations and provides more clarity.
• Session Expiry Time Edge Cases:
  Now, we treat session expiry times set too far in the future (more than 900 years from now!!!) as “Never Expires” instead of showing them as date/times. This aligns with the design specifications, indicating the absence of an expiry time.
• Number Question Input:
  Researchers reported an issue with the Number questions while editing survey responses. Clicking on the plus button resulted in the input displaying a big scientific number and preventing further addition. It’s now fixed.
• Responding to Video and Audio Questions:
  We resolved an issue where researchers encountered an error when attempting to record video responses for the Video questions or when uploading audio files for the Audio questions in the researchers’ dashboard.
• Preferred Unit in Mass and Length Questions:
  Researchers faced an issue when attempting to edit responses for Mass and Length questions. The survey responses editor wasn’t showing the unit selected in the previous save/submit. We fixed this issue.
• Submission of Question Contents for Survey Responses:
  We addressed an issue where survey question contents were submitted incorrectly while editing the responses in the researcher dashboard. This fix ensures accurate submission of question contents, which should be empty in the researcher dashboard, as part of the responses metadata.
• Null Display in Activity Editor:
  We fixed the unexpected “Null” display in the Matrix Reasoning’s Welcome Message and Ending Message fields. We also fixed similar occurrences like activity button captions and button icons. This ensures consistent behavior across activity types and text properties.
• Participant Phone Number Verification:
  We addressed a critical issue within the participant Android app where the application crashes when participants attempt to verify their phone numbers through the onboarding alert.
• Entering Large Study IDs:
  Participants using the Android apps encountered crashes when entering large numbers for the study ID while attempting to join a study. Although we don’t have large study IDs now, we’ve implemented a fix to prevent such crashes.
• Question placeholders in public surveys:
  Resolved an issue where question placeholders in public surveys from the same survey/session were not displayed even if there was a response by the anonymous participant of that session.
• Signing up as a participant after being invited:
  Fixed an issue preventing invited participants from signing up, caused by case sensitivity in username (email address) validation. Now, that validation is removed and participants can sign up or log in with their email addresses no matter if the email address has uppercase letters.

📣 We Value Your Feedback – And Your Stories

Have the updates improved your research? We encourage sharing your experiences on our Community Forum or via email. Your feedback helps shape our future updates and motivates the Avicenna community.

🌟 What's Next?

We remain dedicated to improving Avicenna. New features are in the pipeline, aiming to further enhance your research workflow. To name a few upcoming features, we're introducing:

• Commenting on Survey Responses: In this upcoming feature, you will be able to comment on survey responses and discuss that with your colleagues.
• Adding Reason for Changes on Participants Data: This feature will allow you to write why you change a participant's response. This is a useful feature and a requirement in many regulatory frameworks.
• New Enhanced Version of Our Authentication: We are improving our security measures to better safeguard your research data.
• Recording Televisit Calls: Wouldn't it be useful to record calls with participants? In our upcoming release, you can just do that. This will substantially increase the quality and effectiveness of remote consultations.
• And More: Stay tuned for additional features and improvements, as we continue our mission to optimize your research experience.

Exciting times lie ahead for Avicenna, and we can't wait to share these enhancements with you.

Let's keep pushing the boundaries of research together with Avicenna.