The Curious Case of the Axed Comments

Because we strive to deliver the best time tracking application on the market, Tahometer is in a constant state of growth and evolution. Just as with nature, however, sometimes progress requires shedding old features that no longer serve a purpose. So now, 2 weeks after you have all been blessed with Tahometer 3.0, we thought it was a good time to explain why you can no longer leave comments via the desktop application.

Although this was a standard feature in our previous releases and surely would have been easy to implement, we regret to inform that axing the comment field was not a result of any of the morally acceptable options below:

  • Sleepless nights
  • Coffeeless days
  • Surprise bear attack in the office

 

Quite the opposite, in fact. After carefully considering your feedback, our very attentive and caffeinated staff concluded that established as it was, this was a feature that was barely used by our users, and thus simply had to go.

But what kind of relationship would this be if we just did away with pieces of functionality without first asking our users for permission? We would never! You can still send us your comments by entering them in your personal dashboard on the statistics page.

 

The change comes with a few great side effects too. As a result of this decision:

  1. Tahometer is more lightweight
  2. The agent has a more intuitive design

 

So let’s design Tahometer together. We appreciate every single customer and are always open for discussion. In fact, why not tell us right now in the comment section below what you think about this change? You have the power to influence the development process without writing a single line of code.

Get cracking, then.

2 Comments

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  • Hi Tahometer Team!

    I see your points, but I disagree.

    The client application allows user to start/stop tracking working hours and select project you work on “in place”. I do not see any difficulty on adding one more text box, appearing by button same way as you made selecting project – to edit description “in place”. And for user who uses this feature it is the only right way for it.

    Opportunity to edit working hours description afterwards using dashboard is a good feature to do some corrections. But if I’m the one who actually use the feature of working hours description, then if I have such editing opportunity as a main for setting description for my work-hours, then it makes me have to constantly go back on dashboard, try to remember what I was doing at some particular time, probably review screenshots to remember and then for each 2-3 hours edit description and set it properly in your popup. I’ll absolutely will not use it this way. Probably for somebody else this way is ok, but for me it is ridiculous.

    I saw recently you’ve had issues with this edit box for description – sometimes copy/paste did not work in it and sometimes when I change language an type to it, it is was getting filled by repeating the same letter while I press different keys. Probably this is partly the reason why it was not used? And the reason why people had to go to dashboard afterwards and edit it?

    I understand that you wanted to make tahometer client design more lightweight. I agree that it is a good idea. But I do not see any contradiction in that and editing description. It can’t be an excuse for dropping the feature. You could make a popup combobox for selecting project, same way you could do popup text-box for editing description. I’ve made mockups how it could look and sent it to your support team.

    I hope you’ll consider this! Thank you!

    Regards,
    Aleksey.

    Aleksey 7 years ago Reply


    • Thank you for being so supportive and proactive! I’ve added your feature requests to backlog with customer feedback.

      Several notes to clarify the situation with comments:

      1. We axed out comments exactly because we wanted to make the app as simple as possible and not overload it with functions and features. In one of the next releases we plan to add task tracking right in the app.

      2. Now we are totally redesigning dashboards, so traditional Tahometer statistics page will disappear and a new full-fledged personal cabinet will appear. if you are interested in what will be changed – read https://blog.tahometer.com/2017/08/04/from-simple-statistics-to-full-fledged-dashboard/
      You’ll also find our Product road-map there 🙂

      3. We are sorry that some features fail to work perfectly, we are fixing minor defects, but our technical force is directed towards new web-cabinet, many surprising features are waiting to be released.

      Stay tuned!

      John Feathers 7 years ago Reply


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