I sat down with a few friends the other day to do some usability testing, after reading this article. I thought I’d sit them in front of my first run experience and ask them to do some very basic operations:

1. Create a task
2. Create a project.
3. View a task.
4. Create a milestone.
5. Assign a task to a user.
6. etc

Well it turns out I didn’t get very far as I hoped I would. They both failed at step one, neither of them could see the main menu. This is obviously bad, really bad. So an emergency rethink needed, in the below screenshot you can see the new dashboard interface with the old menu system. The main menu is in dark orange on a light orange background, making it easy to see on a bright monitor – but camouflaged into the background on darker ones.

Below you can see the new menu system:

We’ve made the following changes:

• Reduced the items in the main menu, this should help keep the interface simple and focused.
• A new user submenu(top left), this menu will contain information about the person logged in.
• The search bar has moved(top right), this helps to conserve space for the rest of the screen.
• The main menu is now on the right, and is in big black text making it stand out – more importantly hard to miss.

After these changes, both friends could use the application and complete the tasks given to them – a massive improvement.

We’ll probably tweak this more over the coming months, but I learnt a very valuable lesson:

Watch someone else use your application.

I was recently contacted by a new user of Task|mate who asked “How do you set due dates on a task?”. At first I explained that we only supported due dates by bundling tasks together, and questioned why a due date at task level was required. After a short email conversion it was obvious that this was a feature Task|mate that would make our customers very happy.

I’m now very pleased to announce that, this feature is live and available for all our customers to use. You can see this new feature on the Add/Edit Task sections, however when shown on the dashboard – it’s true potential becomes obvious.

As you can see below, it’s no incredibly easy to see what you should be working on next.

Your feedback really does help in improving Task|mate and we’re always eager to hear your ideas.

Please get in-touch, your idea could be implemented just like this one.

Other Usability Improvements

We’ve been really busy over the last week, and also implemented the following improvements:

• Improved Navigation between Projects/Milestones/Tasks
• All commands have been consolidated into one "Action Menu".
• After adding a new task, the screen will now automatically refresh.
• Improved layout of Task Information.
• Improved layout of New Task section.
• Improved My Projects menu section.
• Improved layout of Timesheets.

I’ve put live on the server a small usability release that contains the following fixes:

• Drag and Drop in Internet Explorer 7
• Deferred Tasks are now styled correctly
• Projects are now always displayed in alphabetical order
• Milestone graph now includes deferred tasks in the completion percentage
• Improved display of non set fields (ie. Assigned, Estimated Time) for Tasks in a list
• Minor Performance enhancements.

These changes further show our commitment to a high quality product, that gets out of your way - leaving you to manage your projects more easily and effectively.

I’ve just finished deploying the new improved international support for Task|Mate, up until now all dates and numbers had to be in a British Format.

For Example:

Numbers: 1.00
Dates: 24/12/2008

Task|Mate will now lookup your locale from your browser settings and use the settings of your default language, which should increase the usability of the system for everyone outside of the UK.

I’ve just pushed out a small maintenance release to the server to fix a defect with creating tasks that aren’t assigned to a specific milestone. Sorry for any inconvenience by this defect.

On Wednesday night we released the latest and greatest version of Task|Mate onto the production server. I’ve made a few large changes since the last release, the most visible is a complete refresh of the entire Task|Mate interface. Below you can see the new interface showing the dashboard screen.

I hope you agree that the new interface is a lot cleaner than the previous version, and makes more efficient use of the screen.

New Navigation between Projects

The biggest change is the removal of the left hand projects menu, this has been replaced with a new pop up menu. Clicking the “My Projects” link at the top of the screen, you’ll be presented with your open and closed projects.

Task Details Preview

Anywhere you see a task summary, you can now click the 3 dots “…” after it’s title to view a preview of that tasks details, this is a small use ability change but can be a real time saver.

With Task Preview Disabled

With Task Preview Enabled

Milestone refresh

In this latest release the milestone section got completely replaced, you can still drag and drop between statuses except now there organised vertically rather than horizontally. With this latest revision to milestone’s we’ve added these additional properties:

• Start Date
• Progress bar
• Files (Non Free Accounts Only)

Example of New Milestone Screen

There’s also been lots of “under the hood” tweaks made to the system, which you can’t see but the system will work faster and smoother because of them.

The transfer to our new server has now successfully been completed, and we’ve seen some impressive speed differences. The image below shows the increase in speed we’ve seen just from loading the www.task-mate.com homepage.

As you can see the system now runs twice as fast as when hosted on the previous server, hope you enjoy using your new faster more reliable system.

We would like to apologise for yesterdays unscheduled downtime. Task|Mate is currently hosted on a server in our office which lost connectivity to the internet yesterday due to problems at our local exchange. We’re now in the progress of moving the service to a new server outside of our office. We should have completed this move in a couple of days, as a side effect of moving to the new server you should see a significant increase in speed when using the system.

We’d like to apologise again, for any inconvenience caused by this.