Leavetrack
Easy absence management for small organisations
And it all went wrong!
Over the weekend, I shipped a new update which I thought would massively improve how customers booked absence.
It used a nice modal effect, some whizzy animation when they made a successful request but I had made a fatal mistake.
As I watched customers use the new functionality on a Monday morning, I cringed as I spent three minutes watching one of my poor customers try to do what should have been the simplest thing in the world.
What was that mistake? In short, thinking that because I knew how to use it, all my customers would.
I recorded a 6 minute video all about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbqLkg39Mck
I made some design decisions back in the day which have not really stood the test of time.
The first was that a user's location was a string in the database. Literally, "London". This was OK but to really evolve the application it needed to become a fully-fledged model in its own right.
This update does that and also integrates with the Abstract API geolocation API to create a location automatically when a new user signs up.
The second part of the update is to allow creation of default leave policies per location e.g. each employee gets 20 days leave and can carry forward 3 days to the next year.
Both of these changes streamline adding new users as it allows admins to configure defaults based on where the employee is working.
Added the ability for users to sign in with their Google Workspace accounts.
If the user is an admin on the Google Workspace account they can also import users from their Google Workspace directory to set them up in Leavetrack. This avoids the need to have to re-type all the information into Leavetrack.
Bit of a faff to get this working as the Google docs on the API are vast and it's quite hard to piece it all together.
More information on the support article - https://support.leavetrackapp.com/article/33-integrating-with-google-workspace
Went off into a bit of a rabbit hole...
Had implemented most of the code for MFA but wanted to soft launch. This led me to looking at how to implement feature flags in a Rails app and the Rollout gem. That then led me to the RolloutUI gem.
After much fiddling, I now have a nice dashboard to manage feature releases and MFA is available to approximately 30% of my users and will increase to 100% by 18 April. Also integrated Headway for product announcements.
I added an update that allows administrators to import public holiday information into their account. Until now, public holidays had to be added manually and if there were employees in multiple locations, this could be time consuming.
Using the Abstract API for public holiday information, admins can now import public holidays for a certain country and then apply all or a subset to the account.
Since I launched Leavetrack 9 years ago, there has been one daily email containing a list of outstanding requests for users' attention. That's it. And no way to turn them off.
I've ramped up development recently and I became fed up of the morning email telling me which requests for holiday were outstanding.
Users can now choose which emails they receive from Leavetrack and I've added two more - a daily and weekly summary of who's on leave on that day or during that week.
Comment