About website usability

I can’t remember if it was in a book I read or a quote I ran into on the blogosphere, but I must admit it has proven to be a great philosophy for guiding our website design.  

“If your users need to read a manual on how to use your site, its too complicated!”

Our design team is really striving to make WorkGrabber as straightforward and easy to use as possible.  Unfortunately, sometimes we have a bunch of computer programmers deciding on whats “easy”.  The way I see it, every link, every button, every navigation should make it’s goal extremely obvious.  Tonight I wanted to throw out an intial “sneak peek” at what our (overly?) simplistic menu design will look like for an individual job:

If you already have a pre-pre-alpha invite (yes, we’re really calling it that), then you recognize this.  There’s alot more on the page and we’ve gotten some feedback on what its missing and what was a little too much (thanks Alf!).  As long as its satisfying your needs and you don’t have to think about “how do I…”, then we’re happy!  If we need to explain how to work our site, then we’ve failed!

UPDATE:  Thanks for all the interest and sorry for not posting this on the original post.  If you’re a contractor and want to get one of our “pre-pre-alpha invites”, just send an email to “ppalpha@workgrabber.com” with your info.  We’d love to hear from you!

When and how to get customer feedback

Nowhere else is the ability to change direction quickly more necessary than in the web application realm.  With new sites popping up all the time, you need to be able to adapt quickly if you want to stay competitive.  The best way to do this is to anticipate your customer’s needs and get new features out the door as quickly as possible.

Our team at WorkGrabber has been soliciting feedback, comments and criticisms from day 0.  This usually takes on many forms, but a very popular way is to dive head first into communities of your customers.  Fittingly, many organizations’ true colors come out at this point as well.  

Reps from certain larger companies will often start a topic with good intentions, but when they start getting feedback from their customers that contradicts their established policies, procedures and overall vision, they get very defensive.  In a sense, I understand why.  

These organizations have been at it for a while.  They have a this mental block that tells them “I’ve been doing it like this forever, so you must be doing something wrong.”  When an entire enteprise has been built moving in a certain direction, it’s difficult to change that trajectory.  

That’s why we at WorkGrabber are at a huge advantage.  We’re hoping to change the way contractors work with their customers and prospects.  To do so, we are recruiting you to build our service!  We’re engaging our customers right from the start to tell us what they expect from our service.  What would make their lives easier and more productive.  We’re looking for anywhere you’re making compromises in running your business and tackling those obstacles.

It’s my opinion that once you understand that happy customers are the best customers, your whole perspective on the true value of what you’re creating changes.  Provide a good, useful service and take good care of your customers and success will be inevitable.

Banning blatant spammers

When posting a job, customers are required to provide an email address.  The job will not be posted until the user verifies the email address by clicking on a link in the email.

We’ve decided to also use this as a tool to control blatant spammers.  We are creating a “blacklisted emails” table that will not allow abusers to post any more jobs.  Although this won’t stop all the spam jobs, it should make it more difficult for spammers to post fake job profiles.  

We are also looking into a “commuity-driven” blacklisting / spamming feature where contractors can quickly and easily flag jobs as “SPAM” to help keep the community clean.  More on this feature in future posts.

Should customers have to create accounts?

This is a simple question which has been delaying some of our development efforts.  When a customer submits a job for bidding, should he / she be required to create a username and password the first time?

I know as a user, I hate creating a username / password when I access a site.  If its the type of service where I would be logging in daily for an indefinite period “just for fun”, then I can understand the need for creating a full-fledged account.  However, I don’t think WorkGrabber will be used like that from a customer’s perspective.

So here’s my reasoning.  As a contractor, you will likely be checking the site for new jobs, messages, responses etc. daily.  You need a secure username and password.  The lifespan of a contractor’s interaction with the site is indefinite.

However, as a customer your lifespan on the site is a lot shorter (unless, of course, your house is falling apart).  Once you submit a job, you will be working with contractors until you find the one you want to hire.  After that, your job is essentially closed and you won’t be “logging in” to the site until you have a new job to submit.  By that time, you would have probably forgotten your password anyways.

To summarize, my thoughts are to provide for a customer’s email address when he/she is posting a new job.  This email will be used to send a verification link in an email.  When you receive the verification link, clicking on it allows the customer to manage it, view bids, answer questions, etc.

Introducing the WorkGrabber Blog

So here we are.  This is our first post to the WorkGrabber blog and we couldn’t be more excited!  I think many organizations underestimate the value of having a blog.  The opportunity to share our thoughts, ideas, triumphs and tribulations with the community is something that can’t be overlooked.

We hope to cover a broad range of topics here related to the WorkGrabber.com site.  Topics you’ll see pop-up include everything from developing the site, adding features, soliciting feedback and just keeping the community informed about what we’re working on.   Anything goes.

That being said, we are eager to hear back from you as well.  Please comment with your thoughts on any posts we add.  Our goal is to be a completely transparent and open organization.  We look forward to serving you!