No, it wasn’t an April Fools joke – today we released our newest tool to make managing your employee timesheets easier than ever. We’re calling it the “Time Slider”. The idea was simple; to create a tool that would allow administrators to visually navigate and manage their timesheets. A lot of thought went into this tool, and hopefully you’ll find it useful and easy to use.
What can it do? The Time Slider can be used to resize existing timesheets by dragging the left or right side of any timesheet. It can be used to create new timesheets by clicking and dragging in an area that doesn’t already have a timesheet. It can be used to delete existing timesheets by clicking on a timesheet and then clicking the delete icon in the popup window.
Where’s the old timesheet list? You can still access the old timesheet list (which won’t be going away) by clicking the big “List View” button in the top-left corner of the Time Slider.
Several businesses with locations in separate timezones have expressed their issues with managing timesheets in separate timezones, so with the Time Slider we decided to try a different approach. The Time Slider displays all timesheets in your own timezone by default. If you’re editing timesheets in another timezone that’s fine, but you need to be aware that you’re viewing those timesheets in your timezone by default. To simplify this you can “Slide” your view to another timezone by clicking “View Options” and then selecting the timezone you’d like to display and manage timesheets in.
Feedback. Your feedback is what keeps us on our toes. Time Slider is “beta” which means we still have a list of improvements we’ve got planned for it, but we were just too excited about it to keep it from you any longer! I’d love to hear your feedback about what works and doesn’t work and what we can do to make it better. Reply here in the blog (I watch it) or email me personally, brandon@tsheets.com.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:30 am
Hey dude… I’ve got a big list of feedback on this sucker. First of all, rad idea.. makes it easy to get an at-a-glance idea of what my employees are doing. Here’s my suggestions:
1) Make the list view default, and add the “Time Slider” as an optional view instead. At least in its current state, it’s not intuitive enough to set as the default view.
2) Add a week at a time vertical view, rather than just this horizontal view. Provide some sort of zoom or scaling options for both views.
3) Show all employees by default, and remember which employees are showing between sessions.
4) Provide the ability to move a time sheet forward or backward by clicking and dragging the middle of the segment
5) When dragging the edge of a segment, make the little tooltip show the total length of the segment, not the time that the segment is ending/starting on
6) When dragging an entire segment as per #4, make the tooltip show the starting time of the segment
7) Make the current summary floating div show on mouseover instead of click, so that you can open the timesheet with only one click on the “Edit timesheet” icon. Every click counts. For that matter, you should add a dblclick listener to the segment, so that double clicking on it will immediately open the time sheet.
That’s all! It looks fantastic, by the way.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:32 am
Btw, don’t know if you got my facebook msg on it, but the ClassVibe beta is up!
http://classvibe.com/
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Kyle – great to hear from you, I was just over checking your site out – it’s looking sharp!
Great feedback – that confirms a few of the ideas I already had on my list and gives me a few new ones to think about.
I love the idea of having double click open the edit window, and I also love the idea of having the tool-tip that shows up while resizing show the total time.
I’m still trying to figure out a few other things. For example, I’d love for it to show total time for each day, or week, for each employee but I’m not sure how to work that into the UI yet. Keep me posted if you think of anything else. It might take a bit for changes to show up, but we’ve got a crew of people over here working on things day and night, and we’ve been getting a lot done :)
April 24th, 2008 at 10:10 am
[...] you don’t get there first, build the best web. Thus our investment in things like the “Time Slider” tool for editing time [...]
May 1st, 2008 at 4:16 am
The slider is great! As an agency the employees will definitely use it much much more than the clock-in. Is there a way to allow every user to access this slider but only for their OWN timesheet? Now if to have access to the slider they need ‘manage timesheet’ rights which mean that they can change their colleagues’ as well.
May 2nd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Bruno – Great idea. In fact, we’re going to be adding a new weekly timesheet editor in the near future, and when we do we’ll add a setting that will allow employees to edit their own time with it (and probably the time slider too).
So thanks! It’s on our list.
July 14th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Bruno – Just wanted to let you (and everyone else) know that your request is here! It took a while, but there’s now a permission called “Manage My Timesheets” that can be assigned to each employee, or globally assigned to all employees.
If the an employee has the “Manage My Timesheets” permission, they will be able to create/edit/delete their own timesheets with the Time Slider and the new Weekly Time Card application too.