New website, new focus on design.

We are testing a new design philosophy for our public site at web-appointments.com and are hoping to extend it to the admin area if it proves successful.

There are many opportunities for design improvements that we have identified in the scheduler as shown to your customers, as well as in the admin app, and we're curious to see how people react to the new design and anxious to apply it more broadly in the future.

We are now testing some of those design principles on the public site with roughly half of our traffic.

Let us know what you think!

Out with the old:

In with the new:

Less confusion means less friction means more appointments

Our goal has always been to make the booking process as simple and frictionless as possible. To that end we've decided to make a simple change which is already proving to increase booking rates.

Over the weekend we have deployed a new version of the client facing interface.

Here are the visible changes we've made:

The password field is gone

We used to have a "Pwd" field below the "Email" field to allow clients to set their own password should they decide to come back and book again in the future. As we have now made client logins unnecessary throughout the site, this field was becoming increasingly useless and confusing.

First time bookers sometimes weren't sure what the password was going to be used for, and some didn't realize it was optional, resulting in some head scratching over inventing a new password.

Some returning customers thought they had to fill out that field again resulting in some head scratching over recalling an existing one they may have used with us in the past.

Now it is gone and there is simply no wondering about passwords at all.

The login form is gone

But even for those who realized it was optional and only for first time bookings, the presence of the rather visible login form on the left hand side was too big to ignore.

Some thought they had to register before booking. Some returning customers could not remember their passwords and thought that logging in was mandatory for them. Sure, we explained things in the text below "Returning customer?" but the blob of text was too long and who wants to read things when there's a big shiny login box just below, tempting us to jump to conclusions.

So now the login box is gone. To show it one needs to read the two line, straight to the point text below "Returning customer?" and then click the "log in" link which, as is explained on the same line is optional.

No more jumping to conclusions, no more confusion, no more login for the ultra vast majority of people.


The easier the better. And we think we can make it simpler still. The whole client login thing will eventually disappear entirely as we've found ways to manage everything without requiring people to ever log in, returning customers or not.

We want you to get higher online booking rates and save everyone time. It's already working and we can do even better.

Email notifications tribulations

Some of you may have noticed fewer email notifications than usual lately. This seems to be due mostly to 2 separate issues which happened coincidentally.. one of which took much longer to be corrected than the other.

An honest mistake

Even though we had made no changes to the live version of our email engine, our delivery rate (% of emails making it to the intended recipient's inbox) went down all of a sudden last month.  We quickly found out that we had been mistakenly put on a spam list operated by Spamhaus. This is a reputable company and their lists are being used by many email providers worldwide.

Remedial action: we informed them of the mistake and were able to get removed from the list within hours of noticing the issue.

Unfortunately, even though it was very effective in bringing our delivery rates back to normal levels, this was short lived. A number of our emails were now being dropped again.

A change of policy

Many of our emails were not being put in a spam folder for the most part, but simply silently dropped when received, and some business customers were affected more than others. After investigation we determined that the problem was affecting Yahoo! email addresses mostly and set out to find out why.

It turns out Yahoo! changed their global email policy last month and started rejecting all emails sent by third party servers (like ours) on behalf of Yahoo! users. So any email sent from a Yahoo! email address to anyone (even outside Yahoo!)), but not sent by Yahoo! itself, would be rejected. Since we have a significant portion of our business users and their clients using Yahoo! email addresses, it quickly became problematic as we generally send our notifications using staff and client email addresses to make it easier for people to reply to each other. But this is no longer allowed for Yahoo! email addresses.. and now for AOL's too. We expect other big name email providers to follow suite and eventually we will not be able to send emails on behalf of anyone anymore.

Remedial action: we then started transitioning our email infrastructure to no longer send emails on behalf of other people at all, and instead use our own no_reply email address. From now on, all messages will come from "Online scheduler" using our no_reply email address, but we are also specifying a "Reply-To" header, instructing email softwares to reply to you (when your clients receive a notification) or to the client (when staff receives a notification). So even though you will now always see all emails come from us, you should still be able to reply and the message to go to whoever should get it... just as before, but in a different way.

For more information about the change and how it affected lots of online services, you can type "yahoo email policy change" in Google (good articles here, here and here).. and straight from the horse's mouth here and here.

Going forward

In order to better stay on top of things in the future, we are now hiring outside help (email delivery experts) to handle most of our email traffic going forward. Email delivery has become a complicated science requiring expert knowledge and infrastructure. We could have avoided the first issue (being mistakenly put on a spam list) by negotiating to be put on whitelists instead and we could have mitigated the severity of the Yahoo! policy change by having a better monitoring system alerting us to the specific problem sooner.

In an ideal world, all spam messages would be blocked and none of the legitimate messages would. And ideally, we wouldn't need to worry about how to make our messages not look like spam to the computers sorting them. Instead, emails are getting increasingly expensive and difficult to manage.

Reliable email communications are vital to you, vital to us, and we are going to invest more to ensure that we are among the least affected when things outside our control change or break all of a sudden.

57 new countries for our SMS reminders

Good news, we are now expanding our SMS service to 57 more countries! If you or your customers are in any of these newly added countries, SMS reminders will now offer even more value to you. And we're still not charging a cent more for this feature.

We are now able to send text reminders for the following countries (new ones in bold - yes, there's a lot of bold):

• Andorra
• Anguilla
• Antigua and Barbuda
• Aruba
• Australia
• Austria
• Bahamas
• Bahrain
• Barbados
• Belgium
• Belize
• Bermuda
• Canada
• Cayman Islands
• Cyprus
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Gibraltar
• Greece
• Grenada
• Guam
• Hong Kong
• Iceland
• India
• Indonesia
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Jamaica
• Japan
• Kenya
• Korea (south)
• Liechtenstein
• Luxembourg
• Malta
• Mauritius
• Mexico
• Monaco
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Oman
• Philippines
• Puerto Rico
• Qatar
• Reunion
• Russia
• Saint Kitts and Nevis
• Saint Lucia
• Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• San Marino
• Singapore
• South Africa
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Turks and Caicos Islands
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Virgin Islands (US)

There is nothing you need to do to take advantage of it if you have already enabled the SMS feature.

Additional countries will be considered for coverage on a per request basis. Thank you.

Automatically cancel unpaid appointments

Sometimes it is useful to collect some kind of payment at the time of booking, perhaps as a reservation fee or because collecting payment offline is impractical. We have long offered a way to do that via our built-in PayPal integration.

But when payment was not just strongly suggested but actually a requirement to letting the appointment stand, you still had to manually check and cancel appointments when clients had not actually processed the payment... up until now that is.

Introducing automatic appointment cancelation for unpaid appointments:

Go to "settings" > "appointment types", click "review & make changes" and in the PayPal section, check the "Auto-cancel unpaid" box and save.

You also should make sure the appointment type is set to require confirmation (a bit higher up on that same page, as we won't cancel a confirmed appointment no matter what).

What this feature does is automatically cancel still unpaid appointments roughly a day after it has been entered in the system. We need this delay in order to account for the time it takes people to go through the payment process, fetch their credit card and so on, as well as processing time proper (as we register the payment only after it has been successfully processed by PayPal). The system will then notify the client via email if the appointment was canceled.

Hopefully this will save some of you from having to keep an eye on new appointments.

As usual, feel free to give us some feedback on this one.

New user preferences and tweaks

In order to better refine our security model and give you greater control over who can access what, the following changes have been implemented:

New preferences for non admin users

You can now allow non admin users to see the "settings" tab and sub tabs, allowing them to manage appointment types and schedules.
You can also allow them to see the "registered clients" tab, which is now unavailable by default.

These preferences are found under "account" > "all users".

Note: regardless of whether non admin users can see the "settings" tab, they can always access the "time off" feature via a link on the appointment list.

Other tweaks

The default setting for all non admin users is not to be able to see/update "settings" or "registered clients". In addition to that, non admin users can no longer access the "settings" > "links" page, whether or not they can access other pages under "settings". They will need to go through an admin user to get access to information on that page.
Lastly, non admin users can no longer delete appointment types or schedules (this is what prompted us to accelerate our plans to roll out the new user preferences in the first place).

Future preferences

We have plans to allow you even more control by having the option to restrict users to only the schedule(s) they are explicitly assigned to. This will only apply to the new admin interface (currently in beta, with a new version coming soon).

Settings menu disabled for non admin users

It has recently come to our attention that some people may mistakenly delete appointment types or schedules from the system, thereby leading to an irreversible loss of data.

To address this problem, we have done two things:

1. the "settings" menu is now off limits to non admin users.
2. the "time off" sub menu was moved out of the "settings" menu and is still accessible to non admin users from links in the "management" section.

We are also working on a new preference option allowing administrators to let other users access all settings or keep them hidden. We will fully support this in our next admin beta update. In the meantime, only admins can now make changes to appointment types, schedules or access the "links" page.

Improved client list speadsheet download

We've had the ability to export CSV files for quite a while now. They are quite handy as they can be opened in a variety of spreadsheet softwares (including Excel and Numbers) and uploaded to databases and third party online services. People have used them as simple backups, to perform statistical analysis or prepare mailing lists.

We currently offer CSV exports for both appointments ("my settings" > "links" on the left hand side) and your client list ("management" > "registered clients" near the top).

We found out that you often need to find out quickly who hasn't booked in a while, who isn't scheduled to come again anytime soon, or a variety of different things typically requiring that you know your clients' previous or next appointment dates if any. While it was possible to find out by downloading our appointment export and going through the list, this wasn't easy and took more of your time than it should. Since our aim is to make your scheduling simpler, faster and more cost effective, we decided to build that in.

As part of our rapid update cycle we have now added both the previous appt and next appt columns to the CSV client list download ("management" > "registered clients" near the top). You will now clearly see every client with their previous and next appointment date (blank if none) and be able to sort on those columns in your favorite spreadsheet software.

More improvements to the way we handle CSV files are in the pipeline for our soon to be refreshed beta interface, so stay tuned.

New countries added for SMS reminders

Effective immediately, in addition to the US and Canada, we are expanding the BETA to include coverage for the following countries:

• Australia
• Bahamas
• Canada
• Cayman Islands
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Singapore
• United Kingdom
• United States

There is nothing you need to do to take advantage of it if you have already enabled the SMS feature.

New countries will be considered for coverage on a per request basis. Thank you.

We're also working on adding new translation languages in addition to Chinese (which we already support).

Android compatibility and bug fixes

For our first revision to the beta version, we have focused on improving compatibility with Android smartphones and tablets.

The experience should be largely similar to the iPhone (our reference device) on devices running Android 3+.

On devices running 2.2+ the experience isn't entirely as smooth owing to a core limitation in the stock android web browser.

In any case, if the default Android web browser doesn't cut it for you (no matter what version of Android you are using), try alternatives such as Mobile Firefox. You can install it for free in minutes and it may provide a superior experience in some cases.
Note: people running Android 4+ can even install Google Chrome.

We definitely would love to hear from you, both negative and positive. What works what doesn't.. and rather importantly, what device and Android version you are using.

Also in today's update are a variety of small bug fixes.