We hate these e-mails too, so we came up with a solution.

*Drum Roll*

Introducing the new Teambox Dashboard! The Dashboard is designed to help you reduce the amount of e-mail you get to your inbox by centralizing all of your relevant information. We hope this will allow you to turn off email notifications without the fear of missing important updates. So how does it work?

Well, let’s just say we borrowed the notifications idea from some of our friends at a social network (which we will not name). In the Dashboard, the notifications section automatically updates whenever changes are made on a project or task. The notifications are sorted by date and time with the most recent appearing at the top of the list. To keep current with changes, just scroll through the list of notifications. In the Dashboard, you’ll also see a list of your own tasks for the day. This list helps you keep track of your progress while monitoring the progress of your team. Instead of having this information spread across several pages, we centralized it into the Dashboard.

Many of our own staff already turned off their own email notifications. They much prefer checking the Dashboard to keep up with tasks and projects. With Dashboard, you don’t need to be afraid of missing something important if you choose to turn off email notifications. Of course, e-mail notifications will still work if you want to use them.

To find out more information about the new Dashboard, visit our help page on the new Dashboard. We are excited to introduce this new feature, and we think it will help you reduce the clutter in your inbox.

On a personal level we had My Tasks. That was useful, but it didn’t scale as you added projects. Now I have tasks for support, management, marketing… even personal tasks. Too much to keep track of!

So we just replaced My Tasks for something much better, called simply Tasks. This new view shows your tasks by default, but allows you to filter by project. That way you can focus on one context at the time and see only what you need to see. That’s great, and you’ll feel the difference if you work on several projects.

Besides that, we also added a user filter on top so you can see what others are working on. Select any user from the dropdown on top to see their tasks on other projects. You will only be able to see tasks from shared projects.

Next we’re pushing a Resolved Tasks filter so you can see recently closed tasks, and also a filter for Late tasks.

This changed the way we work internally, and I’m hoping it’ll do the same for your team!

If you develop software you probably get a lot of spam from firms offering their outsourcing services. “Consider our specialized offshore development team”, blah blah.

I send those emails straight to my spam folder. If I need services, I’ll look for them and compare who’s best.

This is the story of how we hired our “technology partners” for a very special project: our iPhone and iPad apps.

Our first failed approach

First we looked for a freelancer in our contact network to build an iPhone app. It was mostly a disaster from both sides:

• Our API was brand new and untested.
• We defined high-level milestones but weren’t specific on dates or details.
• The freelancer got involved with other projects and it took him months to deliver something that worked.
• We were left on our own to publish the app.
• We defined milestones for features that should be in, but the final product was lacking major details like a landscape view for the app.
• Usability was terrible. For instance, navigating to a section and back to the previous one would make a new (blocking) call to the server, which ruined the experience.

As a product designer, I was very disappointed by the experience. We did publish the app because users were dying for it, but we made it clear that there would be a next version.

Looking for the right partner

At Teambox we have one passionate development team. We have high standards for our code and design. We wanted to work with somebody who would share our ideals, somebody who’d go the extra mile for a feature the user needs and build an outstanding product.

“Should we hire an employee?”. Well, that’s hard. You need to look for somebody outstanding who’s looking for a job. Somebody experienced with iOS apps and APIs. And it’s also a monthly cost you’re adding to your books. “Freelancers?”, no thanks. We already had a bad experience with them. We could fix and improve the failed version,

We found AppUnite, our future partners, on Github while looking for iOS libraries we could use. We liked the attention to detail and how they understood open-source the way we did. Open source turned out to be a great way of finding developers like us.

Setting up the project

To avoid misunderstandings we agreed on very specific details: how the app should work, style guidelines, backend details, etc. These are the milestones we put together for our iPad app:

• Design and mockups for every screen.
• Sidebar, My Tasks, Recent Activity (2 weeks)
• Tasks (2 weeks)
• Conversations (2 weeks)
• Settings, organizations (2 weeks)
• People, pages, files (2 weeks)
• Extra items: ongoing

Everything went exactly as planned. There were no delays and the AppUnite team worked with us, even joining our Talker chat room often, to work as if they were part of our own team.

We had frequent discussions about design and how to implement things. Teambox web took new concepts from the iPad app, and it generally came out great hitting every deadline on time.

Today our iPad app has been downloaded by a huge number of users –both existing and new– and we got phenomenal reviews around the web. The iPhone app, which came out next, got the same results. The team from AppUnite continues to

What we did right

Hiring the right people really makes a difference. The project owes its success mostly to it. But there’s more than that: setting the right expectations, deadlines and clearly defining everything in the early steps of the project is critical.

Then there’s communication. Even if you’re hiring somebody as an external team, you should treat them as part of your team. We shared projects on Teambox and kept in touch daily on our Talker chat room. It helped that they were a team working together before, and we leveraged that to let them work autonomously most of the time.

Frequent reviews helped, and constant feedback. We’d share mockups for every new screen before it was implemented, and made changes to the API when the app required it.

Epilogue

Once the development was over, we sent the apps to the app store. After some time we brought onboard our own iOS developer to maintain them and release new versions. The risk is much lower this way: we already know the apps are used daily and maintained, and it makes sense to support them from the core team.

• Check out our iPhone app and iPad app.
• Check out AppUnite‘s site for mobile apps.
• Check out the new Teambox 4, which was greatly inspired by the iPad app’s navigation.

You see how apps get this wrong all over the place. They’ll display dates like “1 month ago”, giving an imprecise idea of when something exactly happened; or they’ll take the opposite approach and show you something like “2012-02-03 17:39:02 +00″, which is incredibly hard to read unless you’re a robot.

We care about the most significant digit. If it was last hour, how many minutes ago was it? If it was today, at what time was it? If it was last week, which day? And so on. That’s what apps should tell you.

Here’s how we format dates for Teambox. It’s a simple rule, and gives just the information you need with logarithmic precision:

• If the event happened this hour: 18 minutes ago
• If it happened today: 3:49 pm
• If it happened in the last two days: Wed 1:26 pm
• If it happened this week: Thursday 8 am
• If it was this month: Feb 27th
• If it was this year: Jan 19th
• If it was before: Jun 6th 2010

I find this really helps me quickly scan a thread, especially when very old and new comments come together. It works like your memory: you remember very well recent events, but as you can back in time your brain filters out the irrelevant details.

As a bonus feature, we just added a date separator in the activity feed so you can tell what happened today or any other day. Enjoy!