Blog Getquantify

It have been quite busy during the last two weeks and the results are pretty great. I have been working on a better reporting system which not only presents more useful data on all types of reports Getquantify provides but also allows users to export the reports do different format types.

So what has been added?

Every report has a summary section on top of it. No matter what time frame you chose for you report you will always see additional information such are: data for last day, last 7 days, last 30 days and feature breakdown.
Bellow this information you can see the list of items for the time period you have specified before creating the report. This will help you to get the “big picture” as well as the data drill-down on every report.

Export functionalities has been added. You can now export the report into a PDF format and additionally you can export the raw data into the XLS format which is always great for data analyses.

Facelift

I always try to improve the interface when I have a feeling that things could be done better. This time I have spent few hours polishing some of the interactive elements , mainly task list and main navigation, profile images and few others. There is one big area which I still think could be improved a lot. That is the task view. I have a feeling that the individual data parts take too much screen place and could be presented better way. For example I could probably remove the status item as you can change the status from the task list as well. I could also move the time-tracking widget on the top where the tasks icons are, that would save us 2 lines and it would make the view cleaner….and stuff like that

What’s next?

I am going to start with the invoices feature. There is quite a lot what needs to be done. We will need a way to store companies and their information such are VAT number, addresses etc, we will need to have a invoice template, way of picking what to invoice and what not, sending the invoice to client directly from Getquantify with predefined texts and so on…Its a big task but I have pretty clear idea how this is going to work as I do have to invoice every month my clients as well.

If you have any ideas how to improve the app. don’t hesitate to contact me. I am always open to new ideas and it matter of fact lost of new features have been build based on customers ideas.

During the weekend I have been working on the new upcoming reports. I have not finished the feature but I already got pretty close.
As you can see on the video. The reports got few more stats on the top. You can see time spent on the select project in the last day, 7 days, 30 days all time spent on the project since beginning. These summary stats will appear on any time-tracking report.

The full list of tasks with user name and time follows. These are the tasks which were closed in the time period you have specified when creating the report.

The report can now be generated in PDF format so you can print it or send it by email in nice format.

I am planing to add a feature break-down. So you have better understand where the time was spend during the work on the project.

Is there any other information you would like to see on the report?

You can read it right here.

Lots of great challenging questions and they picked brilliant title as well.

Today I am going to show you how I use some auto-testing to simulate the user’s interactivity for UX testing. The video shows only small part of the actual testing. There have been more then 300 different tests I have written to test the application.

As you can see in the video, it looks like it’s me who is putting the data into the application but in reality I am only only holding the camera

Basically the test simulating real time activity, feature by feature. Loging in, creating, updating data.

It was only a week ago I started to design the new media library. The main idea behind this feature is to provide functionality for the user to be able quickly allocate image. Many times you know you have uploaded image into a task but you can’t remember what task it was. Thinking…”If I could just quickly see all the images I would find it in a second” The new media library allows you to do just that. You get the list of all images so you can quickly scan through them. Additionally you can filter the images by project. I use the same color coding I have used for the calendar I released last week. Every image comes with a color circle on top of it, signalizing what project this image is a part of. There is also list of projects on the left which allows you to turn on/off the visibility of images in projects.

Hovering over the image will revile image details, such are: Image name, size, who and when upload it. Clicking the image will open the full size version of the image in new TAB.

Sometimes looking at the image is more confortable when the background is really dark. This is why I implemented additional switch on top of the media screen which allows you to change the background color (dark/light).

Hope you like the new library and will help you to work more efficiently.

Little calendar improvements

Calendar has been updated a bit as well this week. There is a new “Today” button which appears once you start flipping through the weeks up and down so you can quickly get back to you today’s agenda.

I have also added a functionality which shows the finished tasks in the calendar but keeps them little bit transparent and crossed so its easy to distinguish between open and closed tasks (events).

After spending last month on back-end coding and building tests I have finally got into the stage where I can build new features. The first one is Calendar. The calendar can be accessed from the main menu. New icon has been added next to the projects one.

You can now set a deadline time as addition to a deadline date. This makes the task calendar event as well so the task appears in the calendar view with the time you specified.

The calendar is again real-time, which means adding a task or adjusting its date/time will be immediately visible on all calendars. You can also see a list of projects where the tasks in the calendar belongs to. Clicking the project title will switch on/off the tasks in the calendar view.

The navigation on the top right will allow you to go back and forth in time.

This is just a first version of the calendar and I plan to build more functionality around this in the future. I need to find a good way to change a date/time for existing items or add new one. You can obviously do that by clicking on the task item in the calendar but there is not quick way to that directly in the calendar itself.

The dashboard

The dashboard streams have been improved a bit. I have replaced repeating words like “project” & “task” with icons which cleared the streams a bit.

Today’s Events

The top right section has become “Today’s events”. It will display all the events for the current date. It basically mimics the calendar view with the project color.

Hope you like the new features. Let mew know how they work for you.

I am already working on other one so stay tuned.

Since I launched Getquantify2 I have been using the app. every single day for about 20 projects. I am using the app. with few of my customers as well and geting great feedback.

There were few bugs which we found and are already fixed. No more bugs have been reported since, which is great. But many times there are not only bugs which could be fixed. As you work with the app. frequently you discover flows which takes you too many clicks. Sometimes one additional click can be too-many if you do this over and over again. I have found few places in the app. which could benefit from reducing the number of clicks while still keeping the same functionality.

Features, Tags, Delegation

If you have seen these 3 sections before you will now see how tiny changes improved the usability. Before, I had a “list of features” and “add new feature” link bellow. First of all the “add new feature” has added visual noise but most of all the user-flow was not set the best way. Lets imagine you want to change feature for task. First you had to click the drop-down link to see which features have already been created and if the feature was not present you had to close the drop-down, click the “add” link. The “add” link was great if you knew you want to add a feature which has not been in the system yet but…

So what would be the best solution?
The best solution is to provide both options but improve the user flows. It only required to add a link “add new feature” inside the drop-down for features (tags, users). This way you can quickly scan the current features and if you don’t find it you can create with a single click. If you are sure that the feature has not been created before you can go ahead and click the new “+” button to add the new feature. Replacing the “add new feature” link with the “+” button has cleared the interface a lot. Specially, because the same logic has been applied to 3 sections.

Over the last half year I have been working on Getquantify2. The time has come and the second version of my collaboration software is up and running.

I would like to talk about “Whats new” but also answer couple of “Why”s.

Why new branding

As soon I as lunched the first version of Getquantify I was contacted by lawyers of trademark owners for “Quantify”. If you remember I launched the app. under this name. I did not want to spend time arguing about right and wrong and changed the name to getquantify as that is the domain name I bought for the app. anyway. The previous logo was still referencing the original idea, using the big Q so I have decided to change it all together and come up with logo which represents the app. more closely in my opinion. Getquantify is mainly about discussion around tasks grouped in lists and that is what the logo represents.

Why new interface

After using the first version I realized that the UI stands too much in a way. The popups, full page reloads. It was just way to slow to work with. I have also used images to build the interface rather then CSS which slowed down the loading as well. Lastly I was using old version of ruby and the new one is match faster. There was also a problem to get a bird-eye view around particular project or the whole work in multiple projects.

These were the reasons why I have decided to build better, faster and more informative new interface. It follows the concept of horizontal navigation which proved to be successful in other popular web apps.

The new interface is quite fast as I only need to realod the full page content in minimal cases. Most of standard workflow requires only passing small bits of data in and out of the application.

The new interface is live – real-time which means that changes done by other users are immediately present on your site, no need to refresh or wait. It also provides real-time on-screen notifications to keep you on top of things happening inside your project.

New Features

I will go through these very quickly and probably provide video for each later on.

Languages

Getquantify now speaks 7 languages. You can change the language in your profile to any of these: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Slovak

Drag&Drop

Drag & drop now works for all lists inside the application. You can reorder projects, tasks, users, todos. Again these changes are immediately visible to all users connected to the application at the same time.

File uploading – drag & drop / versioning

Fiel uploading is new feature in Getquantify. You can upload files but clicking the upload button or drag and rop files onto the button. It works in most modern browsers which is great.
The versioning is done very simple way. If you upload a file with the same name you will only see the last uploaded file in the list of attachments but there will be double arrow next to the file which has multiple versions and by clicking on the button the older version will reveal. They are sorted by the upload date so you know in what order they were uploaded.

Notifications

There are two types of notifications. You can get email for any change which happens inside a task you are part of (you either created the task, following the task, the task is assigned to you, you left comment). You can customized these emails in your profile.
Additionally you get real-time on-screen notification which appear in the bottom left corner of your screen. You can turn these off if they become to distracting. There is switch available in the bottom of the screen.
Additionally you can see all your notifications on the dashboard.

Activity Stream

This feature is great if you are involved in multiple projects and you need to know whats going on in all of them. The activity stream provides you with a list of all activities across all projects you are involved with.

Stats

The dashboard provides you with some useful stats so you can quickly find out how many tasks you have closed during the last month, comments you left and so on. You get a better idea of you productivity this way.

Skype and User contacts, actions

Clicking on any user name in the system shows you a drop-down with possible contact information (if user entered them in his/her profile). If Skype address is available, you can initiate skype chat or call with that user directly from Getquantify.

Today Tasks

When you login into the application you end up in your dashboard. It shows you how many tasks are assigned to you for today and the list of all these tasks is presented as well.

Reports

Time-tracking is not a new function in Getquantify but now I have build some simple reports so you can use the these data better way. You can not only generate a time report to see who worked on what during the specified period but if you enter a hour rate for a project you can generate financial report as well. You can also generate user report to get a quick overway how busy individual users are (open/closed tasks).

Powerful filters

The filters have been adjusted as well and they work match better way. First off all, they are live, real-time as well. So lets say you filter tasks by tags and another user adds a tag during the time you are looking at the filter. The tags automatically shows in your filter and the task list is adjusted to fit the new situation. You can combine the filters as you like to get to the core of what you trying to focus on.

Task followers

Task followers functionality has been added to tasks. So if you are manager and you wish to keep an eye on particular task but you are not the one working on it, you can do that by using the follower functionality. You will be notified about any change which happens during the life time of that task.

If you do not have the time to explore the app. now you can see screenshots in the press section.

There is no need to register to be able to try the app. I have build a demo – version with full functionality. Check it out!

We have been working hard for last couple of weeks on the upcoming 2nd. version of getquantify. The new version will bring lots of new features. New branding, logo. It’s almost a new app. now

The logo

As much as we like the current logo it does not make senses anymore. We have been forced to change the app name from Quantify to Getquantify and the Q just does not make sense anymore. We would also like to have a logo which represents the app. a better way. This is the current idea .

New features

There are plenty of features we are planning to build but let me give you overview of the features we have already built.

• Dashboard
• Actiivity Feed section on the new dashboard
• Notification Feed section on the new dashboard
• People management layer – more user details
• New task filters – Filter by deadline week, user, feature
• Todos inside your tasks
• Task followers
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Layout switching
• Custom sorting of tasks, user, projects, todos (drag&drop)

Stay tuned, more is coming….

We have been using getquantify for couple of months and we would like to share our experience.

Getquantify is helping our studio (lewro.com) to organize all the projects we are involved in as well as our private projects. We are using it daily so we are probably our biggest customer.

We still like the esthetics of the application and some of the new innovative ways we are trying to do but we are having a problems with the application flow. It is something we have not realized when designing the application and only the real usage of the app. has actually brought this to the light. We have tried to eliminate the number of steps to achive a goal such as creating project, task etc. and at the same time to eliminate clutter. We feel that we have done good job but not good enough.

After using the app. for few months it is obvious we have to speed things up a lot. We need to cut the number of steps even more. We need to come up with something better, faster and even more intuitive.

The application still consist from the minimum feature set and there are features which we need to build in the future. (Trust us we need them as well.) But if the basement is not right we just can’t move on and we need to pivot.

The new interface is going to be lot different and that is all what I can say. There is only one screen from the current app. which is more-less fits the next direction and that is the task edit view. But even this one will be completely rebuild to provide lot faster flow.

We hope you gonna like the new direction.