There is so much buzz about a pending recession that we have to ask: what are we doing to prepare ourselves for it? Whether or not it happens, small business owners and entrepreneurs should be thinking ahead and coming up with a plan on how they will get through it. We believe that small businesses will need to embrace web-based productivity services to weather a recession. Productivity offerings in the Software as a Service camp (including Intervals) will help small businesses cut down on costs associated with manpower, gas prices, and geographical limitations. In addition, using time tracking and task management services enable companies to operate with slimmer budgets by identifying profitable areas and weeding out leaks.

Curt Finch, the CEO of Journyx, elaborates on the need for web-based productivity services during a recession in his article How the Right Software Can Help You Survive a Recession.

Finch sums up why a web-based service like Intervals is necessary for a small business:

The right time tracking software solution will provide your company with knowledge of your per-project profitability, which in turn helps your company survive the bad times and reach new levels of flexibility in good ones. When a recession comes and you need to cut, you will be able to cut intelligently, knowing that you’re making the right long term decision.

Last weekend’s Earth Day festivities were a huge success here in Santa Barbara. The turnout exceeded last year, with hundreds of people walking and cycling to our local sunken gardens for tips on greening the planet and freebies to help get started. I walked away with several canvas bags for grocery shopping and some biodegradable dish soaps.

The true success of Earth Day awareness will be measured by what people do next. And it doesn’t have to be a lot. If we can all contribute one small thing each day, we can reduce our impact considerably. To get you started, here is an elegantly designed site from Wire&Twine with 50 Ways to Help the Planet. Pick one and try it.

Our customers have been asking us to optimize the task management functionality within Intervals by reducing the number of clicks required to update tasks. And we agree. Managing tasks constitutes the bulk of our daily workflow, ideally it would take less time.

Customer feedback is important to us, and we want to be sure we consider it during the development process. We have implemented a contextual menu available using the right-click on task lists. Now you can update tasks with one click and without reloading the page. It is now much easier and quicker to reassign a task, add a comment, or make other general updates. Here is a screenshot to get you oriented with the new feature.

Meanwhile, we’re actively developing more features to improve the Intervals user experience. In the queue are more ajax updates to reduce page reloads and the ability to update multiple tasks at one time. Let us know what you think of these new features and where Intervals is headed.

Our goal with Intervals is to keep improving weekly. We have a lot of features and improvements on our road-map and we get new requests daily (often hourly) from the “feature request” link and the forum. We do not believe that “fully featured” and “easy to use” are mutually exclusive and we strive to keep Intervals growing and evolving while never turning into bloatware. As designers and developers this is definitely a challenge (supplemental reading: Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak (still very relevant) and The Ambiguous Feature Request).

We shuffle the priorities around based on the feedback we are receiving and the overall “bang for the buck” of a given item. Sometimes we will fast track a bunch of minor improvements while other times we focus on a few big pieces. Earlier this year we shuffled around our development plan pretty substantially because the number of Intervals users doubled over four months. This growth in users made speed, performance, and scaling the most important priority.

Today we don’t have anything too sexy to announce, but we have overhauled the “email this page” functionality. The previous way we handled email this page did not have a preview. This is one of those rather small items, but if you email invoices, reports, status updates, etc. it can be annoying emailing yourself first to make sure everything looks correct before sending the final email.

Also, the action icons have been overhauled to use space better (and pave the way for direct to PDF - coming in a few weeks):

When sending an email there is a new preview option:

That shows what the page looks like prior to sending it:

In the grand scheme it is a minor improvement, but often times the right minor tweak can make a big difference in the overall experience.  We also removed a few “are you sure” prompts when closing and copying tasks…I can’t believe we didn’t do it earlier.

The most crucial component of any web design project is the testing phase prior to launch. You want to discover and fix any bugs before the site goes live; online their significance will be distorted exponentially. The problem is clients usually have zero budget for this phase. Most clients don’t understand the importance of testing enough to pay for it (or will offer to do it themselves to save money). This can be a tricky spot to be in. The web site will reflect as much on you as it does your client. How does a web development shop test its work on a limited budget?

Our project manager, and resident sci-fi junkie, Michael, came up with an idea we coined the “Zerg.” We’ve been using this technique for several years now to quickly and effectively clear out bugs before a site launch. Based on the Zerg species from StarCraft, the general idea is to swarm a site with testers in a short period of time. When Zerging a site, the power is in the numbers. Here is how it works.

1. Schedule one hour when at least three people can attend

It is important to have at least three people in the same room during the one hour Zerg. Testers will be more focused and productive, and conversations and response times are much shorter with everyone physically present. Communications during the swarm-like Zerg are accomplished using shout-outs and instant messenger.

2. Zerg the web site

Assign each person a role, a browser, and a section of the web site to test. Then unleash them on the site. Each tester records his findings into an email to the project manager that is sent at the end of the Zerg. Encourage them to shout-out each bug they find. Friendly competition encourages testers to Zerg vigorously and out-test the others.

3. Fix bugs

At the end of the session the project manager should have an email from each tester. These emails can be assigned as tasks or simply forwarded to the developer responsible for fixing the bugs. Once these bugs are resolved, the site should be ready to launch.

The swarming effect of the Zerg is powerful. Testing in numbers will uncover the most bugs in the least amount of time. The formula is simple: the number of persons doing the zerg is equivalent to the number of hours it will cost the client. Three testers equals three hours — a small fraction of any web design project that most clients should be willing to accept. The time spent fixing the bugs can be billed as regular production time. The end result is a thoroughly tested and reputable web site, and a happy client.