Marvel Internet Group blog

First of all - Happy New Year!! I hope everyone enjoyed the break, if you managed to take one. The last new year’s resolution I have remaining, is to increase the communication between myself and all of the great people that we have met using the software, or following the JR blog; I will be damned if I will break that one too!

What happened in 2009

2009 was a big year for JustRosters. It evolved from an idea, into a working product, then manifested into a feature rich rostering solution; and all in a matter of months! We have continued to make changes and build features based on feedback from our clients, and we are very happy with the stability of the platform.

All up we helped 243 companies around Australia assign 25,416 shifts to their 5,455 staff, with very few issues. Due to commitments with our ‘day job’, we did not get to develop or sell JR anywhere near as much as we wanted, but this will be changing ASAP!

Here are a few of the things we are working on now, or will be working on very soon:

- A support forum, in which to discuss all matters rostering, with other managers.

- Integration with Facebook.

- Award wage management; for improved cost forecasting.

- 2-way notifications which allow staff to confirm availability / shift changes by replying to SMS’s or emails sent from the system.

To be honest, we are not doing enough as far as marketing or selling JR goes at the moment; this is misguided considering how well the product is received by the people who do hear about it. We are currently looking for an energetic, hungry, sales person to help our client numbers explode. We are happy to offer a small salary with a generous commission structure, to the right person.  If you are interested or know anyone with mad skills in selling, please email me.

Happy rostering!

Aulay Macaulay
JustRosters Founder

It has taken a couple of weeks longer than we planned, but it’s ready to go!

For all existing JustRosters members, the best way to see what we have added is to log in to your account and have a play around.

If you haven’t started a JustRosters account yet, or just want peek at version 2, check out the new feature tour page.

We have also added discounted yearly subscription options, change our pricing to Australia Dollar, and updated the affiliate program to give companies promoting JustRosters higher commissions.

Huge thanks to everyone who has helped us plan out, develop and test the new features. Please contact us if you find any bugs we have missed. In return we will add 100 SMS credits to your account (valued at $25) free of charge.

Happy rostering!

P.S. Anybody with an expired free trial from the first version of JustRosters is welcome to another 30days. Just contact us with your username and we will add it on.

It has been just over a month since JustRosters launched. We are stoked to have around 100 members signed up; with next to no marketing! After write ups on a few tech blogs, we received a ton of feedback and support from fellow web developers – thanks guys (the blog writers and web developers)!

Instead of making a series of small improvements and constantly having to update our training videos and print screens, we have been busy working on a version 2. At this stage it looks like this will go live towards the end of the month. We see version 2 as a far more complete staff rostering solution. Most of the new features can be switched on or off with the click of a mouse. This way the interface remains uncluttered for those who appreciate the systems current simplicity.

Features we are working on:

Hour Tracking (Heavily requests!)
Keep track of total labour hours per day, per staff and per roster. Advanced features like lunch break exclusion for specific shifts can be added easily.

Cost Tracking
Keep track of the total staff cost per day, per staff and per roster. Weekend rates, overtime and public holidays are all taken into equation.

Shift Change Request
From the initial request to contacting and allocating a fill in staff member; JustRosters makes those last minute shift changes easier for everyone.

Custom Login Area
Customize your colours and upload your logo to make your JustRosters account look like part of your business. Your staff who login will really feel at home, err… work.

Staff Calendar Notes
Give your staff the ability to add notes to future dates. Perfect for staff needing to indicate times of the day they can’t work, without making a time off request.

Broadcast to Staff
Quickly and easily send messages to some or all of your staff via email or SMS. Handy when letting them know about meetings or events not on the roster.

Staff Roster Viewing
Let your key staff view full versions of rosters they are featured on, from home. Save them the time of having to come in and find out who they are working with.

Availability Rules
Effortlessly set the times and days each of your staff cannot work each week, every week. Great for those casuals with other commitments like another job or university.

As you can see, version 2 is no ’small’ update, it will effectively double time we have spent building the system and triple its features and value to users!

We will put a few screenshots of the new features up soon, in the meantime happy rostering!

From this week I will be starting a multi-part series on the coding of JustRosters, touching specifically on the challenges and lessons learnt throughout the experience. Our journey starts on a February afternoon (02/02/2009) at 3pm. The first task that needed to be completed was the installation of a basic CakePHP install.

Installing CakePHP is quite a simple process and simply involves downloading it from the CakePHP page, after a donation, then uploading it on to the server. In our case it is our dedicated U.S. server that will host this application to ensure maximum load capacity and lowest latency for our target demographic. After CakePHP is extracted to a desired location we commit it into version control using Bazaar Version Control (bzr). Bzr is a distributed VCS similar to Git, however it is cross platform and has a much simpler command set.

Once we were able to see the CakePHP default page it was time to analyze the database models. Aulay, being the founder of JustRosters had the best idea of what the application should do and designed the database by himself. My job was to just make sure the table and column names matched the CakePHP conventions so that extra configuration settings would not need to be set on the CakePHP generated models. I also took the time to change any columns whose data types could be improved (int to tinyint) as well as start indexing foreign keys.

With only one hour our project foundation had been laid. Although it is not an exciting event our use of RAD frameworks makes it a much more relaxing process than previous projects where at least a week had to be spent gathering together various pieces of software that managed our database access, email access, templating, etc.

The next post will focus on setting up user registration, validation, as well as user logging in and out. Stay tuned for more.

It has been about a week since we launched JustRosters, and what a week it has been! We have made it with smiles on our faces and the first major revision of the logged in area rolled out.

FROM

TO

After watching a few new users of the system build a roster, we quickly realised that those slow with a mouse were spending a lot of time clicking cells on the left, then having to track over the right ‘Action Panel’ to enter the shift times. The wider the screen the bigger the problem, we needed to head back to the drawing board.

The most logical thing to do was turn the Action Panel into a pop-up balloon which appeared next to whatever was clicked. We made the balloon repositionable, in case you needed to look at cells immediately to the right of the cell you were editing.

The initial re-coding did not take long, but updating the getting started screencast did! We are in the process of changing our front page demo screencast anyway, so it has been replaced with a screenshot tour for now. It will be interesting to see how that effects our conversion rate as clicking the front page demo was the first thing one in two of our visitors did!

I hope new and existing users of JustRosters like the new pop-up balloons as much as we do.

Just a quick post to let everyone know Marvel Internet Group’s first in-house web start-up, JustRosters, has officially launched!

JustRosters is a web application developed to make the creation and distribution of staff rosters easier, faster and more accurate. For a full list of features and a free trial, head over the JustRosters website.

Huge thanks to Alan, (lead designer) and Paul, (lead developer) for helping make this happen.

For those following the 8 part build, I will write part 6 and 7 soon.

Users on free trials will quickly dismiss an application when they are presented with a problem they cannot figure out for themselves. They do this because the only investment they have made by using a free trial is time, and the thought wasting more time is too much for most.

For most developers, they solve this issue by writing how-tos and FAQs. FAQ pages are one thing I have never quite understood… if a question is being asked frequently, why isn’t it explained where the client first needed the answer?

Anyway, the approach to help / training that we find works:

• Build a simple, easy-to-use application in the first place.
• Fill your sales copy with print screens and screen casts of the actual application. This way the user is becoming familiar with the interface before they have even signed up.
• Add a small ‘?’ icon with a brief help text on mouse over, next to every input box. They are easily accessed and indentified by confused users, and ignored by others.
• Create a screen cast walkthrough of the entire system; present it to new users when they login for the first time.
• In the early days, look at every support request as if it is a FAQ; tweak the ‘?’ texts and screen casts where needed.

All the steps above can never completely replace the need for a good old contact page; but they can sure reduce its need.

Customer service email management can often be problematic for companies that offer email based support for their clients. Marvel Internet Group is responsible for handling customer service email messages of some applications that we have developed for clients. One such application has over 1400 user’s support request to manage; we do this with just two staff, before it is even time for lunch.

For some it can be difficult to co-ordinate efforts to ensure that a customer’s inbound enquiries are resolved as quickly as possible. Using a highly structured system for so few staff members will lead to increased cost per response and slow down overall response time. A system that is too simple will mean co-ordination failures leading to confused or neglected customers.

Marvel Internet Group’s solution to this problem is to use a Gmail account for customer service email management. This is achieved by creating a single Gmail address for all customer service support requests. With Gmail’s labelling feature we can quickly label emails based on source so that the support person can be focused on supporting a single application or all applications’ customers. The general work flow that prevents neglect of customers as well as ensuring a streamlined support process is to check, label, and action. This involves having the first person to view the mail account go through all mail and either archive, label another staff’s name, or take action on an email. Then as other staff members check the account they can see which items require their attention.

Prior to implementation of this customer service email management system we had difficulties delegating and following through with customer enquiries that fell out of the support staff’s field of expertise. Using labels such as “waiting”, “todo”, and “complete” each request can be delegated and tracked with ease with staff members in and out of the company. The result of utilizing this customer service system is greatly reduced time spent on support as items are either actioned, delegated, or waiting. Finally an end-of-week or end-of-month review of all incomplete messages prevents any request from falling through the cracks.

To try this for yourself simply create or forward your support emails to a free Gmail account and let your staff understand the simple work flow of: check, label, action. Having your support request come from custom support forms will also save you even more time!

It is about 1month since we started building JustRosters, and what a month it has been! Paul, Alan and I are working on it full time at the moment, and hope to have it complete launched in around 2weeks. The original plan shows building the front-end website as step 6, but in reality this was happening at the same time as the code writing. We finished the front-end ‘store front’ first, so it’s time to share some of our experience and results (print screens can be found after the fold).

We had already established a basic look and feel while designing the back-end mock-ups, so the front-end needed to become an extension of that. Like any web entrepreneur, I spent a few hours half my life looking at other ‘successful’ sites with a similar target market, noting down design and navigation elements I liked. I built a basic sitemap in notepad, and started writing copy for each page. The sitemap went like this:

• Homepage
• Why JustRosters?
• Pricing and signup
• Order pages (linked from pricing and signup page)
• Affiliate program
• Login page x 3 (for administrators, staff, affiliates)
• Contact us page
• Any legal pages I needed + a sitemap, 404 page etc.

If you take out all the ‘standard’ web application pages I was left with 4. The homepage, the ‘why’ page, the pricing page and the affiliate program page. These had to be ‘conversion kings’, so I was intent on making them perfect.

It’s funny, most people think a designer is responsible for what a website ANY type of interface ends up looking like, but I think the copy writer has an equal part in the end product. The words we chose ultimately decide how each page can fit together. After what felt like an eternity of writing and re-writing sales copy, (ok, it was only about 4days), I got Alan onto the designs.

Nothing builds excitement quite like watching a front-end site come together in front of you. I was extremely impressed by how it was unfolding, and found it hard to stop hitting the refresh button every 5mins Alan was working on it. Here are some screen shots of what we came up with:

There is still a lot to do between scripting the home-page demo movie, having the legal guys go over the legal stuff and getting all the copy re-checked by a cool little Aussie start-up called Editeam. The semi-completion of the front-end has provided a huge psychological boost for the team and an opportunity to go get some feedback from some of the people I contacted way back in stage 1.

Hour logs show about 40 hours spent on copy writing and 75 on design. It might sound like a lot for a 15 page site, but I figure the difference between a 4% conversion rate and a 2% conversion rate could be the difference between becoming a millionaire or just a 500thousandaire

JustRosters is an internal project for us here at Marvel Internet Group. It is a side project that is commercially unproven and therefore a risky investment for the company. With that in mind it is crucial for us to be able to complete the project as quickly as possible in terms of both man hours and actual calendar days. To help us achieve this we decided to comb through our previous work and build a reusable PHP library of our most commonly used functions. This collection of loosely coupled functions allows us to easily enhance any code base; belonging to either a client or Marvel Internet Group.

Our code library is split into three parts. One library contains global functions that are included in Cake PHP’s bootstrap file, which is loaded right after the configuration file and before everything else. We currently place debugging and some custom date/time manipulation functions in here so that it does not have to be duplicated elsewhere. Another part of the library is converted into a Cake PHP component. The custom component allows us to reuse convenience functions that are needed inside our controllers, such as permissions management, emailing with PHPMailer, PDF generation, etc. The remaining parts of our library are turned into a custom helper that performs view related formatting.

In total we have reused about 700 lines of code with the three files combined. Using the general rule of thumb that a programmer will produce about 100 lines of quality code per day we practically shaved seven days off our development time before we even started. The cycle of library building will continue and expand with JustRosters. Being one of our most Javascript heavy projects we are also writing a substantial amount of reusable Javascript code that can be combined into another library, or into jQuery plugins, that can be used by the development community as well as our future clients.