Recent Redbooth Updates – Our Task, Helping You Manage Yours

At Redbooth, we’re committed to being a customer-driven organization, and fostering an environment of transparency and communication between our team and our customers. In that spirit, welcome to the first monthly update on what we’ve been working on.

Enhancing the Task User Experience

Our big focus in February was making small changes that improve the overall Redbooth user experience, starting at the core of working with tasks. We feel that we need to make our core features sing before we start layering on new features.

So what task updates did we deploy in February?

• Task descriptions are new to Redbooth. We’ve been iterating on them– enabling you to add them when you create a new task. We’ll continue working on tasks in March and we welcome your input.
• Clean and simple status, due date and assignee design, adding colors and shapes to make scanning tasks much easier.
• Easier adding and moving tasks in task lists. We did this with larger targets, so Redbooth adapted better to the way you used it. We also made moving tasks within lists work more smoothly and intuitively.

Making Time Tracking Reports Work for You

While we were tuning up our Redbooth launch version, we got customer feedback about time tracking. Since we’re customer focused, we saw an opportunity to prototype a few options, share them with customers and gather feedback. This approach helps us accelerate getting our best solution into your hands. We got a great response to the prototypes and used that feedback to develop a nice, lightweight solution. We’ll continue to watch time tracking and iterate on it again in the future.

Our current time tracking reports include:

• Calendar view with a weekly summary along the side and monthly subtotals along the bottom
• Filtering the calendar view by users, project, task
• Exporting time tracking data as CSV or Excel spreadsheet

These reports give a wide range of customers– from IT departments to professional services firms– the ability to easily track time against specific tasks, all within their existing project workflows. It’s also a great example of how we’re walking the talk on being relentlessly focused on helping our clients get their work done smarter and faster by partnering with them to refine the platform.

More Management Visibility in User Reports

We’ve also been investing in making it easier for you to manage your work and your team’s work through transparent reporting. We started with User Reports that you could easily use to simplify a regular management check-in. The Reports feature a dashboard that helps visualize the three Ps every manager should know:

• Progress
• Problems/blockers and
• Plans

We present simple, colorful graphics to quickly communicate the Ps:

• Progress: resolved tasks
• Problems/blockers: overdue tasks
• Plans: tasks due in the next 7 days

We’ve also added a section for Pending Tasks that have no due date yet.

We’re using the reports here at Redbooth every week with our teams. It helps us operate more efficiently and effectively. And, it boosts our team’s job satisfaction by helping us balance workload better.

We’ll be taking the learnings and feedback we receive on this first look at User Reports and apply them to project-based reporting as well later this year.

Preview of What’s Ahead

We’re always tuning up Redbooth, making it easier for you to engage your teams. You’ll see us enhancing user management, notifications, and refining our design in the coming weeks. As we extend further into 2014, you’ll see us bringing our three-screen vision together across the desktop, smartphone and tablet. Together, we hope to enable you and your teams to get work done faster and easier with greater accountability and transparency.

Check Out These Enhancements

Log in to Redbooth today and check out these enhancements, then let us know how we can make them even better and more invaluable to your workflow. Not a Redbooth user yet? Sign up now for free.