Archive for May, 2006
When you work hard it’s awfully nice to have that work recognized – especially by an expert in the field.
The design of the FreshBooks application is a story of continuous improvement. Every release (and the next one is due out very soon) includes improvements that make FreshBooks easier to use. Why does easy matter? Because it ensures a positive user experience which makes people (it’s all about people after all) want to tell other people about your service. Positive experience inspires other designers and it leads to more paying upgrades (i.e. it affects your bottom line).
About three weeks ago I received a call from Jack Bellis of Usability Institute. Jack found FreshBooks through AListApart.com, which is an online resource for web designers, and he tried the service. As someone who literally wrote the book on usability in 1997 (scroll down to “Computers Stink”), Jack appreciates good design when he sees it. What he liked about FreshBooks was the emphasis we have placed on “instant usability”.
While the phrase is new to me, the concept is not. We try to design every aspect of FreshBooks to ensure you are taught how to use the service AS you use the service. The effort we invest in instant usability reduces support calls and increases the number of people who choose FreshBooks as their online billing solution.
Jack’s report is a great read for anyone who has a website. Jack painstaking chronicles 28 things that FreshBooks does right to deliver a great usabiliity experience. Honestly, you can learn a lot from the time Jack has taken to dissect the FreshBooks application. I was amazed at the time he invested in preparing this document – it’s inescapable. Jack did all of this of his own accord – we had no involvement or influence over it. The fact that Jack even bothered is a strong indication that we are on the right track at FreshBooks, and I can tell you we are just getting started – so please stick around.
For those who have not seen this, check out a feature on Digg called Digg Spy which allows you to see what others are digging and commenting on, all in real time. I think this is one of the best uses of AJAX I’ve seen so far, in terms of usability… and me being a design guy, its got some cool design elements too (new content fades in the old fades out at the bottom). I did notice these cool design effects do not show up in IE.
Good work by the team at Digg for implementing AJAX in a way it was meant to be used.
I was just catching up on Lars Pind’s software blog and I came across this snippet from John Gruber of Daring Fireball:
“Once software starts down this path of guessing what it is the user is trying to do, and then doing something special based on that guess, it must guess correctly nearly every time, because the times when it guesses wrong are so annoying that they far outweigh the extra convenience of the times when it guesses right.”
The fact that guess work is not necessary in Software As A Service (SAAS) feedback driven software development is a boon for users and developers alike. Guess work is the reason accounting software companies like Intuit QuickBooks have got it wrong for so long. They built in all the features you could possibly imagine because they had the resources. They did not worry about the fact that it took 12 steps to create an invoice and five hours to set up your software.
In the SAAS paradigm (and FreshBooks is a perfect example of this) it’s now common sense (i.e. “what do we build next?”) that is the x factor for many software services. “How can we add feature A, and still provide our users with the fastest way to generate invoices? Do we even need to add feature A, or is there a work around?”
I went on to comment on Lars’ blog as follows:
“…this is the beauty of software development in the ASP/web2 landscape…you get so much – and such direct – feedback from users that you can make the right move almost all of the time.
Developing software pre a web enabled instant feedback loop was infinitely harder because of the distance between developers and users. SAAS closes that gap and benefits both parties.”
I am sure most of you have already heard about the upcoming feature to send invoices by ground mail, but here is a list of new features that will also come with the new ground mail release.
- Payment Notifications. You can now let your clients know that you have received their payments. If you also use the auto-bill feature, your clients can also be notified that they have been charged. You can even use this feature to make a receipt or a nice thank you letter for your clients.
- The organization field will no longer be required. Only the name of the client will show up on the invoice if the organization field is left empty.
- You will be able edit support ticket details.
- New Payment Gateway (Velocity Pay)
- The PSiGate Payment Gateway will be upgraded to support auto-billing.
- One click logout.
If you have any requests for our next release, please leave me a comment.
This morning at approximately 6:00 AM, sections of Toronto lost power for about 15 minutes. These things happen, but they can be a pain if they happen during business hours and disrupt your business activities.
One thing we have done to prevent downtime in the event of a power outage is we purchased a phone system that has a backup power supply. Why? Unless your phone system is remotely hosted (and most monthly residential call answer services are, but most in house phone systems are not), you lose your recorded greetings and your messages. By having a back up power supply for you phone system, you can avoid having your greetings deleted – at least that is the theory.
So, when the power went out this morning, I called the office to test the backup power supply. Good news! All our greetings and messages were intact. At the end of the day, it’s a small but important thing, like so many other aspects of your business. Just avoiding the hassle of scrambling to get greetings back on the system would have been a real pain this morning, so I’m glad we invested in the phone system we did.
There are a number of little things like investing in backup power that you can do to ensure your office stays up and running. I was recently interviewed by the Toronto Star regarding office security safeguards. In the article I describe how we purchase internet connectivity from two ISP’s and how this has spared us undue downtime. With a little planning and a little foresight you can save your business from unnecessary headaches.
I am going to write more about some little tricks like this in the coming weeks and months – I hope you find them useful. And oh, by the way, as it turns out we need to re-record our phone system greetings anyway because they all still say 2ndSite and not FreshBooks…this detail has been nagging me for about a week now, but at least we don’t have to scramble to get it done .
When the VeriSign payment arm of its business was purchased by PayPal last year I was immediately very worried about its future. I was skeptical that a company such as PayPal would continue to operate VeriSign payment services with the same level of support and quality of service. Until now I had no hard evidence or obvious indicator that this was going to happen, I was just going on my gut instinct. Today I’m afraid my spidey sense may have been right. As of sometime this weekend, VeriSign payment services (now owned and operated by PayPal) has been reporting of “problems” with their batch and recurring billing reporting features. So far, it does not look catastrophic or even really that bad, but it is clearly a big goof by someone on their team.
I logged into my VeriSign PayFlowPro account and all of my recurring transactions were not showing up in the searches for my recurring bills. It is not a huge problem for us because we have records of all this information on our own servers, but it is definitely an annoyance. I should also mention that this does not affect our FreshBooks customer’s transactions at all, since they do not use the VeriSign recurring billing or batch billing feature. I phoned customer support and their introductory message says something like: “if you are calling about the batch problems with PayFlowPro, we are working on the issue and it will be resolved soon”. This doesn’t exactly give me the warm and fuzzies, and even though I heard the message I decided to wait and talk to someone before hanging up. After being on hold for approximately 5 minutes, I spoke to a rep and they told me the exact same thing as the global message and I am going to simply wait until tomorrow before enquiring again.
I will report back tomorrow to see how VeriSign handles this problem. The jury is still out on whether PayPal can handle operating VeriSign payment services going forward.
We have received some positive feedback on our FreshBooks CSS website design since its release and now it is being picked up by some of the CSS design sites out there like CSS Mania and Web Creme.
In our next application release, look out for cool little design changes that will further improve your user experience like error reporting and text rollovers.
It is with great excitement that we make the following announcement:
After two years of dutiful service, we are retiring the NAME of our online invoicing service “2ndsite”, and renaming it FreshBooks.com.
We’re excited. It’s a new name and a Fresh start. (If you want to learn more about why we changed our name, go read all eight episodes of the story).
To coincide (well almost…) with the release of our new name, we will be releasing a new version of our service in two weeks time. The new release includes some excellent usability of enhancements, as well as the ability to send invoices by first-class mail for the US post (including a return envelope). All existing FreshBooks/2ndSite users will have their ACCOUNTS UPGRADED in to include these features in two weeks time in the manner that we roll out our regular bi monthly upgrades.
[Note: If you can’t wait two weeks, you can try the new service, but keep this in mind: don't invest your time setting up a sneak peek account because ALL SNEAK PEEK accounts will be DELETED in two weeks. Why? Please don't ask, just know that if you want to try the new service in advance, that your sneak peek account will be deleted. Go here and you can create a regular account that will be upgraded in two weeks with everyone else.]
Why are really releasing a ground mail service? Honestly, many of our users are confused as to why an online invoicing service would release a service that helps people send invoices in the mail. The fact is many businesses want to do their billing online, but don’t know how to make the transition to online billing, or can’t afford to build their own proprietary online billing system. FreshBooks is the solution for these businesses.
Instead of having to build your own proprietary online billing system, companies can now create a FreshBooks account, import their clients and send their invoices [there is even an API so you can integrate FreshBooks with your existing accounting systems if you need to] - it’s easy and fast. Gradually your clients who receive invoices in the mail will transition to online billing and your business will save the money it used to spend on postage and envelopes and fulfillment.
Billing is a pain – a costly pain for many businesses. FreshBooks is the painless billing solution and it’s low-cost.
That’s the news for today. A new name. A new release [coming very soon]. We have more news coming – lots of it in fact –, so stay tuned and we will fill you in on the details.
My oh my… we just sent out an email to our email list of insiders and beta testers (we call them sneak peekers).
Within 1 minute of sending the email, 30 people had created trial accounts. Giddy-up.
If you want to get a sneak peak of our upcoming ground mail release, send us a note. Short of that, we plan to release the ground mail service – and a bunch of other upgrades – to everyone in about two weeks… after we get the green light from our sneak peekers that is.
Stay tuned.
Same company. Same Service. New Name. Clearer Vision.
What will the new name be? You only have to wait until May 15th to find out. If you can’t wait, email us.
Till then we are busy, busy with upgrades like the ability to send your invoices in the US Post from anywhere in the world, and building our new web site.
Looking forward to peeling back the curtains and letting you in. Sneak Peek visitors will be helping us test next week You can do that if you want as well, just send us a note.
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