New Release - Cutting the Fat
Over the last month we've been hard at work tryi
ng to further polish various elements of our user experience and we're happy to share an update on our latest release. First, here's a summary of changes for our non-developer readers:
- Added additional notifications to our feedback tool
- We removed the character limits on Feedback questions & answers
- We sped up our employee listing and details pages
- We removed a number of features that weren't being used
For you developers out there, though, here is a sneak peak into the thought process behind these changes.
Revisiting Assumptions Having been publicly launched for the better part of 9 months, we figured it's best that we look at some of the numbers for this update. First and foremost, we started looking for features that seemed to be a good idea at the start of TribeHR development, but proved to have little traction. While digging around our logs, we found several features that were being used by precisely 0 (yes, that's zero) of our customers:
- The option to "disable/hide" the company calendar
- The option to "disable/hide" the resources area
- The option to "disable/hide" the feedback tools
- Ratings (using 1-5 stars) for employees
It's always hard to
cut features, but with the date in font of us, each of the above 5 features made the chopping block.
Looking at Traffic Patterns When looking at the usage patterns of our micro-feedback tools, we found some other interesting statistics:
Visits to the listing page of feedback averaged 0:56
Visits to the page to ask a feedback question averaged 2:09
Visits to the page to provide feedback averaged 10:15
Woah! 10 minutes to answer a 250 character question? Based on feedback from our users we identified that the character limit on the questions were causing an issue. After testing out the system without a character limit, we found that the time spent on the answer page dropped to
5:36, but that the number of submitted answers more than doubled! Great to see our analytic tools providing us with clear evidence of improvement.
Monitoring Processing Times
We use
CakePHP for our framework, and we learned fairly early-on that complex data structures can be expensive, but during our latest round of testing we also identified that permissions-checking can also be quite expensive. By re-factoring the code beneath the hood on our employee listing page and employee details page we were able to reduce the processing time on the page by approximately 70%. Note, this time-savings also applies to queries sent through the REST API to /users/index and /users/view/ endpoints.
