Marvel Internet Group blog

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!

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

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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.

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

Deciding how (and what) to charge for JustRosters was definitely a task I had under-estimated. I started by looking at the pricing for some of sites I discovered in Part 1. Of the sites with pricing listed, (I hate sites that do not list prices!), there seemed no typical pricing model. I decided to tackle this problem from the ground up; for my benefit as much as any future clients.

Once off vs. subscription
This was a pretty easy decision to make; monthly subscription. Client benefits of the subscription model include low up-front cost, ability to stop using the system anytime without losing an ‘investment’ and the reassurance we will continue to work for their business month after month. Benefits for us include a steady flow of income on those rainy months and an easier sell.

Include SMS, or charge extra
One of the major costs in running a service like JustRosters will be the SMS’s notifications which are sent out. My initial thought was to roll this into the cost of the subscription; I quickly decided this was unfair for businesses that do not use this feature. To make things simple I created some SMS credit bundles (with pricing related to quantity), and made a note to include a small amount of SMS credits in each months renewal, for free.

How to split the pricing levels fairly
While providing a ‘one size fits all’ pricing scheme would make things simple, it is not really practical. As the amount of staff each company has increases, so will the cost of our time / resources to support them. Comparing information on typical business sizes I decided on 4 plan sizes:

Micro: 0-10 staff.
Small: 11-25 staff.
Medium: 26-50 staff.
Large: Unlimited staff.

While the unlimited plan seems fairly open ended, I figured income from SMS bundles will increase relative to the businesses size, so I was not concerned about the strain a 500-employee company might put on the system at this stage.

Summery
Now I knew I would charge businesses of each size monthly, it was time to build a spreadsheet factoring expenses and a desired profit margin. I would love to be to say this delivered me some golden numbers which I have used, but it really only gave me an idea on what I ‘needed’ to charge to make the business viable with around 500 clients (my first goal).

I rounded these numbers to slightly prettier ones, and moved on wondering how I ended up spending a day on something I thought would take a couple of hours

EDIT, February 27, 2009: I have decided to reduce my prices by about one third. I have done this for a couple of reasons. First, the weak Australian dollar. Since our pricing is based on USD, I do not want my fellow Aussies having to break the bank to pay for JustRosters each month; the economy over here is bad enough for us. Secondly, the software is brand new. We really want to get as many people on the system giving us feedback ASAP. We can always move the pricing up later and hold it for the guys that get on it early.

EDIT, March 02, 2009: One of our competitors has just re-launched their website with new pricing. I am happy to see it comes in around 3x the cost of JustRosters.

The sketches were done and we were itching to get started with the backend HTML mock-ups in stage 4.

Because we have been involved in the ‘setting up the project’ stage so many times, we find it quick and easy. I will leave to more technical details for Paul to cover shortly, but here is what I needed to do:

Step 1 – Buy a domains, certificate and hosting
I headed over to webhostingmarvel.com (shameless plug) and ordered a domain name, secure certificate and some US virtual dedicated hosting. It just so happened I had a 100% discount code I will consider moving the site to a fully dedicated server before launch, in the meantime the VPS will be fine.

Step 2 – Setup email
10mins later the hosting was setup and domain propagated. I headed straight for the Google Apps signup page. I won’t get started on why I love Google Apps in this post, let’s just say it allows me to forget about the dramas associated with standard email accounts and support ticket systems. For now the free addition will do. If we manage to fill a 7.2gig email box with support requests, shelling out $50/y for a Google Apps premium account will be the least of our worries!

Step 3 – Install Live help and mailing list software
I had already made the decision to exclude contact phone numbers from the JustRosters website. This is not because we are a dodgy company, I just think Live Help is faster and offers more accountability (a transcript of every issue) compared to a phone call. We can also monitor the Live Help from home so our support hours become almost 24/7! Our live help system of choice is Livezilla. It takes an hour or so to setup but it is free and has proven very robust.

Our mailing list software of choice is Pommo. Again, free, and very easy to setup. I got Alan to throw a subscribe box on the JustRoster’s homepage in case anyone actually reads this blog and wants a 6months free trial when we launch (hint, hint).

Step 4 – Build a shared doc with usernames / passwords
I created a new Google Doc and pasted in FTP, DB, Google Apps details etc. This doc is then shared with Paul (lead developer) and Alan (lead designer). If we need to add more staff at a later date, I will create separate documents to share with them. While having usernames and passwords pasted in plain text does not sound ideal, it beats using the same password for everything, writing them on a bit of paper or emailing them around. The Google doc can only be accessed via each of our master passwords over a HTTPS connection, so I am happy with the security.

That is the project pretty much setup and ready to get started on. Only about 3hours of my time needed and the cost of a domain, certificate and server. Stay tuned (or subscribed?) for Paul’s technical follow-up post and Alan’s coverage of Part 4 – Building the HTML mock-ups and design.

Now I had a list of features I thought would be useful, I set about sketching the interface. I would use Photoshop or Paint to do this, but I have no skill in either, so I went and found my trusty pen and paper – which, as illustrated, I have no skills with either.

Before I post the scans, I want to reiterate the importance of sketching as early on in the planning stage as possible:

• Sketches force you to consider how your features can work together.
• Even if you are not a designer, the vision is still yours and you are the BEST person to illustrate it. Getting a designer in at this stage will only cost time and money.
• Sketches show you how people will use your app long before any real time is spent on it.
• If you can not fit an interface screen onto a single A4 page, chances are it will not fit on a computer monitor.
• Sketches show you the features you have planned and don’t need as well as the ones you need and haven’t planned.

After a quick run through of the features I decided on earlier, I set about drawing! Here are some of the resulting sketches - click to enlarge:

Sketch 1 – Dashboard with menu system

Sketch 2 – Create / edit / delete staff

Sketch 3 – Options when a roster cell is clicked

Sketch 4 – Manage roster and Preference page

All up there was about 10 sketches. This stage took me almost 5hours, but gave me a true understanding on what was involved, and enough motivation to move forward to the next step, ‘Setting up the project’.

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