After our new “Late Arrival Alert” was launched last week, we got some feedback & changed it a bit to make it easier to read. The time it SHOULD HAVE TAKEN is now shown (e.g. “…taken less than 6 min.” in this alert).
Additionally, a map is now shown for the start/end points which generated the alert, so you can easily see the context of the alert. We embed maps in all location-based alerts (e.g. odd-hours, speeding, etc.).
This alert was generated because I took 18 minutes getting from my house to the office today, since I took “the long way” to stop by and pick up something at a convenience store.
This caused me to take 18 minutes vs. 6 to make it the 4.5 miles to the office from my home, and trip this alert.
Here’s a map of the “out of the way” route I took to get to work today (just to get a few things done before I head out of town for the week):
You can see the way the red line starts “thin and light” and gets “thick and dark” with the direction of travel, which makes it easy to see the activity at a glance. I clicked on the yellow “pin” which shows all stops less than 60 minutes. It shows I stopped for 1 minute.
The red pin down at the bottom is my car stopped for > 1 hour.
It’s Sunday & I’m heading home now to hop in the pool & get ready for my trip, but wanted to show off this new alert functionality first.
By the way, here are the 2 alerts I got which now are “obsoleted” by this alert — I had one for every time I enter/exit either home or work — now I can see ONLY when I get to work when it’s too long of a trip. (not that I really need to track myself — it just makes for good examples when showing our functionality to customers):
Rob.









