New Homepage Design

Today we've updated the look and feel of the Meetifyr homepage and made a couple of minor changes to other pages.

The idea was to get rid of clutter on the page and give a more professional look.  We've removed the unnecessary 'marketing' text and put a focus on getting users to actually try the app to see if they like it.  We hope you like it.

New Features | Preferred Days and Last Updated

There's been a couple of changes to Meetifyr recently, the biggest of which is the ability for an attendee to specify a day as 'preferred'.  This allows them to say "although I'm free for this event on several days, these are the days that suit me best'.

So for a particular day an attendee can be either one of three states; Busy, Free, Free + Preferred.  The idea is that adding this extra option will better enable people to find a day which suits everyone best.

To accompany this option we now total the number of Busy and Preferred people in the column headers.  This was already a feature that had been suggested through user feedback but with the introduction of the Preferred option it was even more important to clearly show how well a particular day suits everyone.

The other change we've made is to start showing the last time an update was made to a particular attendee and also the last time a calendar was updated (we also took this opportunity to improve the look of the attendee list).  Again this was a suggestion from user feedback with the aim of making it clearer to see what had changed since the calendar was last viewed.

We'd like to take this idea further and give a more personalised view of what has changed since someone viewed a calendar but first to make this possible we need to start identifying users, either through logging-on or cookies.  If you have any thoughts on this feature or any others please let us know.

Automated Testing with Watir

WARNING: Slightly geeky content.

With Meetifyr attracting more and more users its becoming increasingly important we don't introduce bugs or break things when trying to improve the site.  Previously we've been manually testing everything before releasing to the world.  This is acceptable when there's not much to the site but soon becomes laborious and in turn less effective with more functionality or when you're trying to release regularly.

To reduce this burden of manual testing we're started to use the Watir browser automation framework.  Using Watir we can write a few scripts in Ruby to test everything works on the site as it should.  Our full suite of tests run in under a couple of minutes and give us confidence we've not broken anything to badly in the name of progress.

The bottom line to this is that we can now make changes to the site with more confidence, which means more regular changes and so you should see the site improve quicker.

Finding Users

Meetifyr has been out in the wild for just under two months and I think we have a product that, although basic, is genuinely useful to some people.  Traffic to the site is beginning to form a regular pattern, to start with we were seeing big spikes as we got listed and reviewed on various Web App sites but now we're seeing people specifically come to the site to use it for its intended purpose rather than curiosity or because its a shiny new thing.  

It would be great to see traffic grow at 5x per month but our philosophy for this project is to "build something awesome and they will come", admittedly we're a long way from awesome, maybe marginally useful, but one step at a time right?

We've toyed with the idea of using Google Ad Words to bring in some users but I'm not sure that's the right approach.  We're in no huge rush to get big fast, hosting on Google App Engine is free up to a quite generous limit and I don't think it is worth paying to chase new users until you can be completely sure you have something that they'll actually find useful and want to use.  Would you agree?

Meetifyr who?

A quick search on Google for 'Meetifyr' currently returns 15k results.  A statistic like this doesn't mean much but the first few pages of results do have links to meaningful reviews or listings for the site.
Its comforting to know we're not being ignored, after all, the only bad feedback is no feedback at all!

The Idea

As you may have noticed Meetifyr is all about being the easiest way for friends to find a time to meet.  In this post I want to put a little flesh on that idea to see what it really means.

The first thing of note is that we're all about friends meeting up, you could use Meetifyr to schedule a busniess meeting or a sales call but that's not what its about.  There's loads of great tools for schduling meetings, they let you specify the specific dates and times you want to meet, intergrate with existing calendars then have clever email notifications to drive the process along.  This's great for a formal meeting but do a group of friends really need that?

When I'm arranging to meet friends for a beer I usually email them with "Beers, this weekend?" not "Beers, Saturday: 7:30pm - 11:00pm or Sunday: 7:30pm - 11:00pm?".  Its assumed I'm talking about the evening since the last eighteen times I've met those friends it was in the evening!  By removing these implied conventions we can make setting up the meeting much simpler.

This lightweight approach to arranging people might not be applicated in all cases but when it comes to organising friends, we hope its the simplest!

New Feature | Custom Date Ranges

Within a few days of Meetifyr getting some real users it became clear there was one feature sorely missing, the ability to specify the exact date range when people wanted to meet.  I sort of knew the options of the next 4 or 8 weeks weren't going to be enough but the plan was to get something simple released early and react to user feedback.

So I'm pleased announce that as of today you can specify the exact dates within which you want to meet.

The feature itself is pretty self-explanatory I hope, just click the date range text then either select one of the predefined date ranges or select a 'custom range'.

Thanks to all those who have given feedback and I hope your happy with the result.  And please, keep the feedback coming!