iZepto Blog

Well, we’ve finished another round of usability tests and have incorporated people’s feedback into the design of the app. Thanks to Cam and Jason for being the guinea-pigs!One of the biggest sources of confusion that we’ve seen is that when people created a favorite (by clicking ‘Add Fav’ on a time entry in the ‘Time Entry’ tab), it took them to the ‘Favorites’ tab, added a new favorite to the list, but displayed an empty ‘Add Favorite’ panel.We’ve now removed the ‘Favorites’ tab entirely - all favorite-related activity now takes place on the time-entry tab. You click ‘Add Fav’, and a new favorite appears in the list in the top right panel:You can delete them in-place too. We’ve also made the list scrollable instead of using a paging approach. Coming soon, you’ll be able to edit them in-place and set optional durations and notes.Next, we noticed that people didn’t understand how the dual-select boxes on the ‘Reporting’ tab worked. So we’ve added some explanatory text:Hopefully this makes clearer what’s in the report, what’s not in the report, and how to add and remove things from the report. It’s amazing the difference that even very small changes can make.So the quest continues…to usability nirvana for iZepto…

We’ve been doing usability testing on iZepto recently and already it’s starting to yield us benefits.The problem with being a developer is that you very quickly become blind to the usability barriers of your application. You coded it in the first place and have tested it countless times since. Consequently, exercising the UI becomes almost an automatic action for you. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for new users.Fortunately, usability testing comes to the rescue. It’s absurdly easy - essentially, we just got a few friends in (thanks Mat, Chi and Drew), asked them to attempt specific tasks, and then recorded what they did and said. And almost immediately, this process yielded us some valuable nuggets of information as we saw our friends stumble over things that we had taken for granted.The most immediate was that they were struggling when it came to entering a task when creating a new time entry. So now we’ve added some explanatory ‘Search here’ text to the search box:Note that the ‘Search here’ text disappears as soon as they move the focus to the box. And if they don’t enter text into the box and move the focus somewhere else, the text will reappear!Next, we observed that when our users created a new time entry, they didn’t always notice it appear in their list of time entries - from their perspective, nothing happened at all. So now we’ve made it that new time entries are briefly highlighted in orange to herald their arrival into the world. Furthermore, the list of time entries is now ordered by most-recent-first and uses a scrollbar instead of paging:These are only the first of a bunch of improvements we can make - we’ve noticed some other things that we’ll be taking action on soon. For example, users were struggling to find the ‘browse’ link underneath the task field. So we’re going to make it more prominent. And finally, our users commented that the screencast was too difficult to read and too long. So we’re going to address that in the next couple of days as well.

So I thought it was worthwhile to tell the story of our tagline - Timesheets made human. Don’t bother getting a hot beverage or settling down for a long read, it isn’t that kind of story. But I think it does highlight what we are trying to do.OK, so let’s start with the statement that EVERYONE has a timesheet system. Well, it just seems like that, anyway. Go ahead, Google ‘timesheets’ and see how many results you get.However, if you start looking at them you will find that they all follow a similar paradigm - a crap one. They have started with the Excel spreadsheet view of the world and tried to make an application that works the same. Result - crappishness.With iZepto we want to create a timesheet application with a huge focus on making time entry natural, intuitive and fast. No one wants to waste time, but it seems like most of our competitors don’t even think about that when designing their systems.So, our whole point for ‘Timesheets made human’ was to emphasize that we are starting with YOU, the human when we think about how to implement some functionality. Not what an existing spreadsheet or document looks like.For interest sake, we thought about the following:- timesheets made humane (rejected: probably going too far to describe other systems as inhumane I guess)- timesheets for humans (rejected: as opposed to those designed for androids?)- it’s the only way you will get paid (rejected: I laughed at this one, but probably not that insipring)

I would love to believe that people are going to spend hours looking through the iZepto site, pouring over the user interface, playing with the functionality. Fortunately I am not delusional (well, not about this at any rate).I have always applied the ‘5 minute rule’ when evaluating software, so why expect anything else from all of you good people? So what is the ‘5 minute rule’? Basically, if you can’t convince me pretty quickly that the application:

• Looks nice (yes, User Interface does matter)
• Has some decent functionality
• The company looks credible

OK, this is pretty basic stuff but the point is that life is too short and if something doesn’t appear to meet my needs I can easily find one that appears to.So my challenge is now that we are on the other side of that fence. What are people looking for? How will they evaluate our home page? Are we explaining all the cool features in the right way? Are we trying to get across too much and we should just strip it back?Yes, these questions keep me up at night. Seriously. I love iZepto, and I think it really is a fresh way of solving the timesheet problem. But if no one knows we exist or drift on without signing up then it isn’t doing much good.Keep watching as we focus on the ‘first 5 minutes’. We hope that your first five minutes will reflect all the other five minutes you would experience if you decide to dive in. After all, our entire focus is on making Timesheets For Humans^TM.