ididwork

We’ve just pushed a new Dash tab to the manager account that will help you get a quick snapshot of what your team’s been up to.

The first section is your employees’ latest entries. This lets you see the latest entries of each member of your team, as well as when each entry was posted and the kudos it has received.

The second section is a chart that shows the number of kudos each of your team members have received over the current review period.

Let us know what you think, and whether you’d like to see other information in the dash. Email us at the usual feedback[at]ididwork.com or leave a comment. Thanks!

We’ve released a new feature on the Feed tab that lets you tell your teammates that you appreciate their work. We feel that getting complimented at the office is very encouraging - it helps let you know that people noticed the positive impact of your work.

Next to each teammate’s entry you have the option to give kudos. Kudos are a quick way to thank a teammate, let them know their work helped you, or let them know they did a great job:

When you click a Kudos your teammate will be notified in their feed:

I feel good whenever I see that!

It would be great to hear your thoughts on this. Leave us a comment, or shoot us an email at feedback[at]ididwork.com

Riding along the tail of the last feature update, we’ve added support for UTF-8 encoding. For our international users, this allows you to now make entries in your native language.

Big thanks to Dan from Anyvite.com!

We’ve made some changes to the feed tab that many of you requested:

1. See your entries in the feed
Your entries now show up alongside your teammates’ entries. This makes it easier to track what’s being accomplished on the team and how your work fits in.

2. Filter the feed by user
Your teammates’ names are now links, and if you click one of them you’ll be able to see just that teammate’s work feed. This is helpful if you have a large team but want to quickly see what a few specific people have been working on.

One of the things we strive for at ididwork is to make it as simple and fast as possible for you to log your work entries. Ideally, you wouldn’t even have to log into our site. We’re taking the first step towards that goal today with the launch of our new feature - integration with AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and Gtalk to log your entries.

When you log in, the first change you’ll notice is a “Use IM” link in the top bar:

When you click it, you’ll be taken to a page in the settings where you can enable your IM screenname:

Enter your screen name, and choose which IM service you’re using from the dropdown menu. When you click “Save Changes”, you’ll be taken to a page that will show you which IM screen name to message:

In this case, for my gtalk account, I would message “[email protected]”.

That’s it! You can now add that screenname to your buddy list and start messaging in your work entries.

You’ll also notice some helpful tips on how to add tags, time, and todo tokens to your entry. We’ve updated the syntax a bit - in an earlier iteration of ididwork the syntax was to enclose all special tokens with brackets. We’ve now changed it to a simple rule - put a “#” mark in front of any tag. For example, regarding this blog post, I would submit something like this:

“#blog #:30 Finished the new blog post about IM integration”

#blog is the tag, and #:30 means I spent 30 minutes writing it. If I wanted to add it as a todo item, I would have just added “#todo” to the entry as well.

Why’d we change the syntax? We’ve found through several usability tests that in most cases, it’s a bit faster and easier to type the ‘#’ symbol.

This is just the beginning. We’ll be adding many more ways to enter or transfer data into the system, and better ways of getting it out. If you have any ideas regarding either of these (email, firefox plugins, desktop widget, etc), feel free to leave a comment or email us at feedback[at]ididwork.com.

Updated UI

We’ve made a couple changes to the UI to make things a bit cleaner and easier to understand:

1. The old ‘Comments’ tab is now called ‘Reviews’
   We thought that ‘Reviews’ described this tab better than ‘Comments’
2. The ‘Analyze’ tab has been moved to a submenu on the log page
   We wanted to group all the ‘Log’ related functions onto one page, and give more exposure to export

And here’s the new look:

New Analysis Graphs

We’ve also made a big change to the kinds of analysis graphs that are now generated. There’s much more emphasis on tags, and you now have the ability to compare tags based on the amount of time you’ve spent.

Here’s an example graph that shows a tag breakdown based on the number of entries:

And here’s that same data using the “time spent” option:

By looking at both the number of entries and the time spent, you can get a clearer picture of where you’re doing work. For example, I can see here that I do a lot of UI tasks, but they take very little time.

We’ve also added a graph to the individual tag pages, which can be accessed by either clicking the name of the tag in your work list, or by clicking the tag bars on the Analyze page:

Here you can get a detailed look into how much time you’ve spent on a given tag, broken down by week.

Let us know what you think! Feel free to leave a comment, or email us at the usual feedback[at]ididwork.com.

We’ve just added the ability to create a to-do list, if you’d like to plan your tasks ahead of time. To start entering to-do items, simply use the special tag “todo”:

We’ve added a new To-Do link in the Recent work bar, which you can click to see your todo items:

When you’ve finished the to-do item, click the green “Done!” button to have it transfer to your normal work log.

For those of you who keep tabs on the amount of time spent on your tasks, we’ve also added a shortcut (you’re prompted the first time you finish a to-do item, or you can enable it on the Display page in Settings) to allow quick entry after completing a todo item:

As always, feel free to leave feedback/suggestions/questions in the comments, or shoot us an email at feedback[at]ididwork.com

We’ve made a pretty significant change to the way tags are entered to make tags more accessible and consistent across the app. Don’t worry though if you’re a fan of the brackets - we’ve made it backwards compatible so you can still enter tags and time spent using the old method.

To enter tags, click the “add tags,time spent” link on the bottom of the enter work form:

This link will then be replaced with the tag/time spent entry form:

Just enter the tags or time spent into the box (or click on existing tags that populate on the bottom of the form), and click submit to add that work item.

Our goal is to make it as easy and fast as possible to enter new items. We’ve enabled keyboard shortcuts so you can enter in your work item, hit tab, enter in your tags, then hit enter to submit so you never have to use the mouse.

One other note - we’ve also created tooltips that will give examples and help documentation for features that need a little more explaining. These can be accessed by clicking the question mark links. We’ve only put them in the new tag entry form for now, but feel free to shoot us an email at feedback[at]ididwork.com or leave a comment below if you feel that there’s anything else on the site that needs better documentation.

We’ve switched around the UI a bit to make things a little clearer.

First, we’ve moved the functionality from the “click to analyze” link that used to be on the bottom of the log page to the new “Analyze” tab. We thought that one of the coolest things about ididwork is the analysis that you can do on your work, so it deserved a little more attention. Plus, it’ll give us some more leg room when we get to adding the new chart types for time spent, etc.

The second thing is that we’ve replaced that “click to analyze” link with “older entries”. This does what you’d think it might - it takes you to a feed of your older items. We’ve broken it up by day for easier consumption.

We’ve also (finally) added our Privacy Policy. There’s a link to it on the bottom of all the pages.

We released the team portion of ididwork in a somewhat broken fashion - as a team leader (ie, manager), you couldn’t add your own tasks. There was no real good reason to do it this way (and dozens of emails letting us know why we shouldn’t do it this way), so we’ve fixed it.

Managers now have a very simliar looking view to the individual account. You’ve got a log tab (where you can enter in your own work and analyze it), and a feed tab (where you can see updates from your team).

The difference now is that a team account has an “Employees” tab that replaces the “Comments” tab found in the individual account. Here, a team lead can give feedback to their team, and look at the history of feedback given to their team members.

This is just the beginning. We’d love to get more feedback from managers on just exactly what they’d like to see in their team account. Please email us at the usual feedback[at]ididwork.com, or leave some suggestions in the comments.