Hello. I'm an attorney and I've been using Billings Touch for the past year or so to track my time on my iPhone. After getting a bit frustrated with some of Billings Touch's shortcomings (and the developer's lack of interest in improving it in the near term), I started looking for a replacement and found Time Master, which I've purchased and have been using for the last week or so.
You have built an app with excellent functionality! But the interface is not as polished as it could be, and I'm hoping my suggestions could be of help in that regard. If you'd like me to elaborate on any point, just let me know.
Sure, we're always happy to hear feedback from our users!
(1) There appears to be a bit of redundancy in the interface, making the screen feel crowded at times. For example, in the Time Entries screen there are at least two redundancies:
--"Time Entries" is highlighted at the bottom AND I have a large black bar at the top reading "Time Entries";
Yes, the Title bar is part of the iOS (iPhone Operating System) and must be there for the controls to work. The Tab bar on the bottom is how you select which screen you want to be on. It will highlight the screen that you are working on. For example, if you go into Reports, the Reports will now be highlighted. Again this is a necessary part of the iOS.
--There is black button in the bottom left that says "Today" or "Yesterday" or whatever AND a grey bar at the bottom of the entries that reads "Filtered by Yesterday".
Those are the "Filters" and is the only way that you can activate/change the filters and know what they are set to. Since we've had problems in the past with users not realizing that they were looking at "filtered" data (they thought that they "lost" records), we found it necessary to also display that line when you have filtered results. If you are not filtering, that bar will not appear.
These redundancies take up precious screen real estate and make it harder to recognize the information I really care about. As an example of how this could be cleaned up: In the top black bar, eliminate "Time Entries" and replace it with buttons for the date and client/project/task filter. I'd suggestion using icons rather than words (e.g. calendar with funnel on it for date filter) as they can be hidden better than
That would be impossible as that is handled by the iOS and we are not going to re-write Apple's operating system from scratch. That would be far too much work. Sorry.
(2) When changing dates or filters throughout the app, Time Master put the rolling selector thing at the bottom half of the screen, and turns the top half into a grey stripped wasteland, which is quite disorienting. It would be better if whatever it is we are editing remained visible in the top half of the screen.
We are limited in what we can "get away with" when developing for the iOS. In some cases, such as this, this is really our only option for being able to display important information to the users. We hope that after you get used to it, it will become second nature to you and you won't worry about it as much.
(3) It would be helpful if I could change the start time of running time entries. (E.g. if I forget to change it when I go to a meeting, but remember 5 minutes in - I should be able to push the start time back by five minutes right away rather than waiting until the meeting ends).
When we start a "timer" the timer is an item that is running on a separate process and in the background. It has to take the time that was set in the entry and do the math on it after you stop the timer. It would become a real mess if we then had to track that you changed the time from underneath the timer while it is running. If you need to change the time, you will have to momentarily stop the timer, adjust the time and can then restart the timer. There is just too much going on there to be able to change/track this information while it is running.
(4) I happen to think the column headings of "Date" "Client" and "Time" or "Total" are overly large, again taking up more screen real estate than necessary and distracting me from the relevant information below.
We cannot change the size of Apple's iOS like that. You are the first person to comment on the size of any of the text. I wonder if you should consider an iPad instead of an iPhone for doing most of you entries? You could use the iPad when it is convenient and use the iPhone when you don't have the iPad with you. You could then use our optional Synchronization module to keep the two units in sync. Just a thought?
I'm sure I'll have additional comments as they come along, but those are most of them for now. I think you've got an excellent product going, which could be made better if only it had a bit more polished interface.
We do appreciate the feedback. I wish I could have been more positive with your suggestions, however when it comes to changing the tools that Apple provides for us, unless we want to try and re-write all the screens and make them custom, that is not going to happen. That would be a tremendous amount of work to write a complete system from scratch, so unfortunately we are not going to go there with this. Again, I hope that you will become used to the iOS interface and it won't be too much of a distraction in the future. I do admit that we are trying to pack a LOT of information in a small space (iPhone screen), but we feel the power and flexibility of Time Master is the most important feature of the app.
Thanks!
