• Chargify has makes it a breeze to implement upgrade & downgrade features, and so we’ve updated our payment processing system to use their API. As part of this upgrade, we’re rolling out 15-day free trials on all our packages.
• Denny’s in Niagara Falls has free wifi and massive portions of bacon. This does wonders for productivity.
• The new design is coming along nicely – we’ll post some more early preview shots at the end of the week
• You can see some sneak previews of a side-project among the photos we posted to Facebook

All told, this week we’ve pushed live 5 major commits to our live servers, and dozens of minor ones to the development trunk – it’s going to be an exciting February!

"Inventive mobile applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch"

Enflick, Inc. develops inventive mobile applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Founded by two computer engineers, Jon Lerner and Derek Ting from the University of Waterloo, Enflick creates mobile solutions that expand the potential of today’s leading mobile platforms. Recent products include TextNow, a fast and reliable texting tool, and PingChat!, an instant messaging platform designed specifically for smart-phones. Innovative and dedicated, the Enflick team keeps consumers in mind to design user-friendly products that make people’s lives easier.

Derek was looking for an HR solution that could offer them an effective and user-friendly area to post jobs on their website. Their needs: a tool that would give all the team members access to review applications internally without a long and convoluted process and an easy way for job postings to appear seamlessly on their website and portal. When they first signed up, it was TribeHR’s simple job board and applicant tracking tools that piqued Derek’s interest. “TribeHR fit the bill for our immediate needs, however they also provide a wide array of other options that we immediately recognized we can put to use as we grow. There is no doubt that in the future we will have more things that we find useful from TribeHR.”

With an easy going and relaxed staff culture, Enflick’s 15 team members wanted a tool to fit the overall style of the employees. With diverse industry backgrounds – some have worked at Google, others are entrepreneurs, and others have PhDs in Physics – there are different mindsets present, so it was important to have a mechanism that all could adapt to. The staff has both consumer and enterprise software backgrounds and TribeHR works with all of those. “We didn’t want anything that would require too much time or be complicated to get going. Rather, we simply needed a tool to help get the job done and allow us to focus on our core work.”

“It was important to us to find a tool that would work for a start up like ours. We appreciated that the TribeHR team was willing to recognize we had a specific need (our job postings) and that they were comfortable in focusing their energies to help us with this piece. As we grow into expanding our human resources, TribeHR’s proven track record with other tech companies of similar size helps us know we made the right choice.”

For more information about Enflick, visit http://www.enflick.com or follow them on Twitter at @enflick

We’ve embedded the jingle below, but it’s worth visiting the link above to browse the other horrible logos and jingles that they’ve made for happy(?) clients.

Hope you enjoy your weekend!

Your mission, should to choose to accept it, is to go through a series of 5 mini tests, each of which will help us better understand how people see and use our new design. Don’t worry, there are no right & wrong answers – we’re simply trying to determine where our new design makes sense, and where it can be improved.

The test will be open for 24 hours – feel free to share the test with others in your network – the more input we receive, the better! Thanks, in advance, for your help!

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.

"In a world where the team is often everything, TribeHR might just be a startup's most valuable asset"

In case you missed it, we were featured in Boston Innovation’s Spreadable Startup Series yesterday:  TribeHR Strives to Make Human Resources Human Again. The article is great (you should read it – it does a fantastic job of highlighting how awesome we are ) but the idea behind the series is even better.

The series is supported by Grasshopper Group, a Boston-based group that builds hot tools like Chargify and Spreadable. The series tells the stories of founders behind interesting new startups. Rather than a simple product showcase, it’s an introduction to the people and ideas behind new companies. The series is worth checking out, especially if you’re running a startup yourself.

I won’t copy the post verbatim here, but to whet your appetite, here is a snippet from the article:

… they made some conscious decisions early on to depart from formulas they’d used in the past, both on a product level and in the way the team was pulled together. “Starting with the API was a big departure. In the past, the API was always something that we got to when we have enough developers and enough user base. We really do believe that with this product, good integrations with other products are going to be key to success, so we wanted to make sure we had a robust API right from the get-go,”

Click here to read the whole article or if you’re already a fan of TribeHR, you can help us spread the word with Spreadable.

Ant's Eye View - "Cultivating customer experience from the ground up"

Ant’s Eye View is a customer experience strategy practice with offices in Seattle, Austin and Silicon Valley. Their growing team delivers proven expertise in internal collaboration, social media, community building and management, and influencer strategy development.

With the company reaching a staff of 16, Chief Idea Officer, Jake McKee was seeking an HR solution that would not require a dedicated person with formal HR training and would be genuinely easy to use. After having sought out an HR consultant to help do a gap analysis around their HR practices and processes, one of the suggestions to Jake was to build and use formal employee files to include employee agreements, review work, and background checks. Jake began looking around for an HR system that would be helpful and had what they needed feature-wise, but was “not so crazy and over the top that it was just hard to use.” TribeHR was the best solution.

“TribeHR offers an easy and efficient solution for our company without the added strain of learning a lot of new terms. I would definitely recommend TribeHR for companies that are of a similar size to ours. With exceptional turnaround time for questions, unmatched customer service and an extensive, but easily communicated knowledge of human resources, TribeHR and the TribeHR staff have been great to work with.

“As I am ‘it’ when it comes to having a human resources person at Ant’s Eye View, it was incumbent that this tool not require a huge amount of time and effort for me to be able to offer to my staff what they need. TribeHR is robust without being overwhelming, which is a vital part of why it works so well for us – it is a simple solution to our HR needs.

The model of the interface and how the pages work is understandable. For so many other tools out there, you have to think like an HR person and if you don’t, then quite simply you have no idea where to find what you are looking for. For TribeHR there is no professional training needed. It is clear for me as a newly anointed HR administrator and things are exactly where I expect them to be.

The TribeHR team is incredibly responsive. They have been great in squashing bugs and expanding/tweaking functionality. And, if a request can’t be done, they take feedback and look at how to make the tool work for the company within what currently exists. A web app is only as good as the team building and supporting it and I have absolute faith in the TribeHR team.

For more information about Ant’s Eye View, visit www.antseyeview.com or follow them on Twitter at @antseyeview

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.