The week kicked off with us being featured in BostInnovation’s Spreadable Startup series, but from there, we picked up a number of hits from interesting places including Killer Startups, FeedMyApp, Ziipa, WWWhatsNew and HiManagers.

All told, this coverage resulted in some interesting traffic results. As a Canadian startup, we’re used to seeing upwards of >70% of our traffic coming from Canadian locations, with the rest primarily stemming from the US.  The traffic over the last 7 days, however, looked more like this:

In this last week, Canadian traffic accounted for only 11% of our visitors. It’s worth noting, though, we didn’t see any reduction in Canadian traffic – rather, we saw an increase in international visitors. This global increase in traffic translated into a 15% upwards surge in the number of companies using TribeHR to manage their teams, including some interesting companies from India, Thailand and Africa.

Supporting that growth, we also quietly released a number of tweaks and changes to further streamline several of our features:

• Improved Email Notifications for Time Off Workflow
• Enhanced Templates for Job Sites
• Additional Performance Enhancements
• Several Minor Bugfixes

Additionally, we continue to make progress on our user interface redesign – we’ll be taking it to user testing and focus groups over the next few weeks. In the meantime, while we continue to refine the interface, here is another sneak preview of our new design:

Side note: if you didn’t see it before, you can also check out our earlier sneak preview.

One of the aspects of TribeHR that we’ve always been particularly proud of is our easy-to-user interface. We’ve always worked to try and keep work-flows smooth, actions intuitive, and information accessible. That being said, we also recognize that there is always room for improvement. A few months back we released a new version of our public website (www.tribehr.com), but we haven’t yet brought our application’s theme in line with the new look. We’re right now in the process of re-working many elements of the application user experience, and in the spirit of “We can do better!“, here are a few areas that we’re working on.

The first area that we’re looking at is the general theme and colour palette that’s being used. In the original version of TribeHR we aimed for fast, lean and minimalist. Because of that, we have very basic design elements, and the original colours were chosen for high-contrast rather than thematic unity. The result is an interface that doesn’t deliver on the joy and warmth that’s implied by our current public-facing website. We’re working on it.

The second area that’s receiving some attention is the structure of our administrative area. As TribeHR grew and we adjusted our administrative tools (e.g. we have many more vacation tracking options now than we did when we first launched) and our navigation structure struggled to keep up.

We’ve received comments from many directions that the navigation in the administration could benefit from some TLC and we’re spending a lot of time on it. Don’t worry, in the upcoming UX refresh there will be a much cleaner approach to administration navigation.

Looking at our usage numbers, the employee listing page is one of our most-frequently used pages. As we mentioned in our previous post, we’ve invested significant time into trying to improve performance on this page, but we’re also revisiting the way this page is used. We’ve found three key ways in which people use this page: most administrators are using this page as a launching point for reviewing specific employees, most managers are using it as a way to see what their team is up to, and most employees are using it as a way to explore the actions of their peers. TribeHR does a great job with the first scenario right now, but it is sub-optimal for the others. We believe that there is opportunity to improve both the type of information that’s included on this page as well as the layout of employee records as they relate to departments and teams. I can’t share too much yet (the new layouts are still works-in-progress) but I can let you know that we’re paying particular attention to the manager and employee use cases I just mentioned.

Beyond the sections that have been raised above, you’ll also be seeing some changes to the work-flows and interfaces in our Reviews feature (we’ve figured out a way to reduce our 4-step review process down to a single step) as well as our Jobs tools (this area is used a lot, and high usage = extra attention).

In short, over the last six months we’ve collected a lot of information about the way people use our tools and we’ve identified some great ways to smooth out more rough spots while making the software look and feel more exciting to use. Although things aren’t quite ready to reveal, I can offer you a sneak peak at what’s coming down the pipeline!

Have any questions or comments about the upcoming design changes? Let us know in the comments.

• Added Norwegian Krone as a currency (in response to this request)
• Added additional notifications to our feedback tool
• We removed the character limits on Feedback questions & answers
• We sped up our employee listing and details pages
• We removed a number of features that weren’t being used
• We tweaked the interface for employee and applicant notes (in response to this feedback)

For you developers out there, though, here is a sneak peak into the thought process behind these changes.

Revisiting Assumptions

Having been publicly launched for the better part of 9 months, we figured it’s best that we look at some of the numbers for this update. First and foremost, we started looking for features that seemed to be a good idea at the start of TribeHR development, but proved to have little traction. While digging around our logs, we found several features that were being used by precisely 0 (yes, that’s zero) of our customers:

• The option to “disable/hide” the company calendar
• The option to “disable/hide” the resources area
• The option to “disable/hide” the feedback tools
• Ratings (using 1-5 stars) for employees
• Tags for employees

It’s always hard to cut features, but with the date in font of us, each of the above 5 features made the chopping block.

Looking at Traffic Patterns

When looking at the usage patterns of our micro-feedback tools, we found some other interesting statistics:

Visits to the listing page of feedback averaged 0:56
Visits to the page to ask a feedback question averaged 2:09
Visits to the page to provide feedback averaged 10:15

Woah! 10 minutes to answer a 250 character question? Based on feedback from our users we identified that the character limit on the questions were causing an issue. After testing out the system without a character limit, we found that the time spent on the answer page dropped to 5:36, but that the number of submitted answers more than doubled! Great to see our analytic tools providing us with clear evidence of improvement.

Monitoring Processing Times

We use CakePHP for our framework, and we learned fairly early-on that complex data structures can be expensive, but during our latest round of testing we also identified that permissions-checking can also be quite expensive. By re-factoring the code beneath the hood on our employee listing page and employee details page we were able to reduce the processing time on the page by approximately 70%.  Note, this time-savings also applies to queries sent through the REST API to /users/index and /users/view/ endpoints.

We have set aside Sunday’s as the day to sit down and drill away at each one. Over the next few weeks you should see a few things changing:

• Speed improvements: if you have a lot of data things really slow down. The current target is the people tab as it is the slowest to load but we will be trying to shave a second or two off of all the screen load times.
• Log in and account creation: dropping a load of employees into a HR system needs to be as easy as possible, we don’t think it is as simple as it could be.
• Payment gateway: we are evaluating different options to using Paypal.
• User Experience: the design genius at TribeHR is hard at work on a much improved experience now that we have settled on the features. This might take the longest to deploy, current goal is to have it ready for January 2011.

There are some other big things being planned but we will leave those as a surprise

When peers ask me why I want to work in HR, my response is simple and honest: I love working people and better yet, managing the variety of skills people offer.

On my various co-op terms I have worked with a few data entry systems, and one thing they all had in common was their poor aesthetic appeal. This includes but is not limited to bland colour schemes and little to no graphic use. TribeHR is a refreshing change to the standard. It’s colourful and it’s interesting to look at which is important if you are spending a large chunk of your day working on it! It also eliminates the need for pesky file folders (and paper cuts!) as TribeHR allows you to keep employee records neatly organized online.

Needless to say, I’m excited to help eliminate the stigma of human resources being a boring hassle, and help TribeHR create a name for itself in the industry!

• You can now add more files to an applicant, it’s not limited to resume and cover letter anymore
• Jobs now have additional fields for “closing date”, “location”, and “# of open positions”
• You can define your job summary/teaser text as opposed to relying on the auto-generator
• Various vacation tracking UI tweaks
• New Annual Accrual and No Accrual options for automatic earning of time off
• New templating options for your Job Site (check out Miovision’s careers page for an example)
• Job application forms are now captcha-protected
• New AJAXified management options for job applicants
• WYSIWYG editor upgrades

In the next few blog posts we’ll dig into some of the design decisions in more detail. In the meantime, keep your eyes open for our next update, which will include some new tweaks to our Feedback, Job Postings and Vacation Time tools!

If you’re a follower of the Toronto Tech Startup scene, you may have heard about TechTalkTO coming to town and that the first speaker is Jeff Lindsay, who created Notify.io and was one of the first supporters of WebHooks.The first event is September 15, and you can sign up here.

The reason this is important, is that we’ve been a big fan of WebHooks for a while, and are jazzed to be able to say that TribeHR now supports WebHooks for your integration pleasure!

For those of you already familiar with WebHooks, click here to jump to the documentation. For those that aren’t familiar with WebHooks, they are essential HTTP POSTs that occurs when something happens in TribeHR. WebHooks allow you to specify a URL that TribeHR will POST to when a specific event occurs. For example, registering a URL for the event Note.Add, would trigger a POST to that URL when someone adds a note to a user’s file.

We have a long list of events that we support with WebHooks callbacks, and we’re looking forward to some neat and crazy integrations – so be sure to let us know what you come up with!

With this most recent update, we now support single-sign-on from your Salesforce account. All you need to do is enable this option in your Setup area of TribeHR, then add TribeHR as a Web Tab in your Salesforce account. Then, any time you visit TribeHR from within Salesforce, you’ll be automatically logged in to your TribeHR account. It’s that easy.

Of course, we have more detailed documentation available for you to reference.

The major benefit of this new feature, is that for those of you who have your staff logging into Salesforce constantly, you can make it easier for them to engage with other parts of your company and other employees without having to remember another username and password.

We’re always keeping our eyes open for more ways to streamline TribeHR for you, so if you have any other suggestions of things like this, just let us know in the comments or over at our Community Support Site.

Navigation Change
We’ve moved the “Org Chart” & “Job Descriptions” out from “Jobs” to under “People”, which essentially makes “People” a view of your current organization, and “Jobs” all about hiring.

Jobs Layout Changes
Since the Jobs section is now more about the hiring process, we’ve altered the layout of the “Open Rositions” page to be more about the jobs we’re looking to fill. This is more in keeping with other applicant tracking systems, so it’ll feel more familiar to those of you that have used other tools as well.

Stages vs. Status
Previously the “status” of an application doubled as the interview stage as well as the “active” or “inactive” status. We’ve separated that into “status” which can be any of an active, archived or hired candidate, and “stage” which is your interview workflow (e.g. “new”, “first interview”, “2nd interview”, “references” etc…). Also, in the Setup area you can now edit the stages of your workflow.

New Contact Candidate Feature
When reviewing candidates, there is a new “Contact Candidate” option, which opens up a simple email form – if you send an email using this tool, the body of the email is also added as a note to your review of the application. This is intended as a first step towards simplifying the sending of rejection and offer notes, and email piping integration (more on this coming in the fall!).

As always, we welcome feedback to our updates – please feel welcome to post a comment below, or drop us a line on our Customer Support Community