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:

New update policy

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our scheduling solution, we are now shifting to a policy of rapid, customer driven, small updates that matter.

What this means is that you can send your suggestions to our support team to be considered for rapid implementation.

Received suggestions will be categorized as short term or long term depending on a number of criteria. To be included in our short term update cycle (roughly a couple days to a week), your suggestion must be narrow in scope and useful to a broad range of users.

For example, asking to add a shortcut link from one screen to another will be considered for the short update cycle. A request to add support for a new language will not (this is a long cycle consideration).

When we receive a short update cycle suggestion (try to send only one suggestion at a time), we will consider it and make a decision quickly, then implement it within our short update cycle target period.
If you wish to take credit for the suggestion should we announce it publicly, you may give us permission to publish your name and website address (please include them in the suggestion email). Without this explicit permission and attribution information, we will not mention you at all.

A typical suggestion email would go:

Could you add a link from here to there so we can do this and that more rapidly. You can give credit to Name and website.

Thank you and suggest away!

SMS feature live

The new SMS (text message) is live for everyone to enable.. or not. It's off by default of course but you can enable it under "my account" > "company details".

Note: only admins can access this screen and turn it on/off.

As a reminder, here's how the feature works:

• a text message will be sent to client profiles with a valid north american number
• the number used to satisfy the above criteria is the one in the "cell phone" field
• a reminder will be sent on the previous evening or late afternoon for appointments the next day in the morning
• a reminder will be sent in the morning for appointments in the afternoon / evening on the same day
• the text of the reminder is as follows: "Appointment reminder: BUSINESSNAME DATEANDTIME local time. See email for details. No reply."

We may still tweak this feature further but at this point we're confident enough to make it available to all that want to enable it.

Volunteers needed!

We have a new feature brewing that we need beta testers for... since our next round of updates will be focused on reducing no shows, we are looking to add SMS (phone text message) reminders for clients as a first step.

We need some volunteers for our public beta test so we have decided to open it to those who can show that they are avid, faithful blog readers :) All you need to do is contact us by sending a support request from your account requesting participation in the beta test and we'll enable the SMS feature for you if we still need testers.
You need to have a valid, non expired account obviously :) (trial users welcome too) and will need to have clients primarily in the US and Canada.
We'll update your account as soon as you are accepted into the beta test or we'll let you know if it's too late.

Here's a description of the feature as it works today:

• text message will be sent to client profiles with a valid north american number
• the number used to satisfy the above criteria is the one in the "cell phone" field
• a reminder will be sent on the previous evening or late afternoon for appointments the next day in the morning
• a reminder will be sent in the morning for appointments in the afternoon / evening on the same day
• the text of the reminder is as follows: "Reminder for your appointment with BUSINESSNAME DATEANDTIME local time. Check your email for more info. Please do not reply."

Of course, for those of you who don't make the beta, you can still send us your feedback based on the above description.

Thanks and Happy Scheduling!

Some limitations lifted

Told you the next post would be about visible changes :)

Thanks to the move to our new and improved infrastructure we are pleased to announce that we have removed some limitations of the calendar feeds:

• it now includes the schedule name when using the global feed
• all feeds now go up to 6 months out as opposed to one

Also, the client list Excel download now includes the profile notes which was the only field previously excluded.

There is nothing you need to change on your end!

We have also been working on several, bigger, things and will be announcing them separately (they deserve their own posts) as they become available... actually starting today with our beta text message feature!

Customer support 2.0

Just a quick note to let the world know that we've updated our support system to include (at last!) direct email communications both ways. So from now on you can start a support request via any of our contact forms or by using our support email (support at instant-scheduling dot com).

Rules you need to respect (or else):

• for new issues, questions or suggestions send a new email (with whatever subject) or use the contact forms
• for things related to a previous inquiry, just reply to our email (don't use the contact forms and don't change the subject of the email)

Improving communications

In an effort to streamline our communications with our customers and resellers, we are pleased to introduce this new blog. You will find:

• status notices
  
• new directions we are considering
  
• new features that are added

Please feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed so you can get updates however you want to get them. This will give you much more control as to what you wish to be notified about and we will be less reluctant to blog about relevant things happening at web-appointments.com and instant-scheduling.com