Ask HN: Please review my app: Scheduling (employee scheduling software)

I like that wording a lot more and think you're right about that.

The hardest part about making a complicated schedule is making sure all the posts are covered. Do I have six editors, four designers, two rewrite, one reader and three runners in on Sunday? And if not, who is available -- they haven't worked six days in a row, aren't due off that day or on vacation and have the right skills -- to cover?

When your app can answer this for schedulers you've got something great. Otherwise I fear a spreadsheet is "good enough" and free. Good luck!

I built a similar project last year, but abandoned it due to lack of business.

Just around the time I got my beta out, I discovered shiftplanning.com (they were in beta about a month before me) - I would say quality wise, my build was very similar to shiftplanning, much better than schedulefly.

The reason I ditched it was that after working with a number of local businesses, I found they always had excuses to not use it. They would say stuff like 'if you can show us our monthly labour costs, then we'll start using it'. But they weren't able to get monthly labour costs the way they used excel, so an online solution would have been better. Another request was holiday scheduling, which I did add, but still, no increase in usage. It was excuse after excuse, so I clearly think this is an area where people recognize a pain, but don't seem to care enough about it.

Along with that, my heart was not really in it (I was convinced to build it after mentioning to a friend that it was crazy how businesses were still scheduling with excel and paper, etc.etc.).

The problems aren't technical. There are LOTS of scheduling sites. I hadn't seen any of quality until I built mine, and then saw shiftplanning. Your site looks pretty good, but schedulers should be able to select a shift, rather than entering a time, as most businesses have standard shifts for their business, and then need the ability to just edit the time for specific cases, stuff like that.

In the end, I'm happy I didn't dedicate too much time to the project. Looking at the compete scores http://siteanalytics.compete.com/schedulefly.com+shiftplanni..., this just doesn't seem to be an area of interest to businesses.

ShiftPlanning is free, and they still can't get a large number of users. The problems are multiple.

1) You can likely only target small businesses or branches of a larger business. I spoke to a few chains, and they all said (surprisingly) that they don't dictate an online schedule service for their outlets.

2) It is an add-on service option for large operations like call-centers,etc which is already offered through their pbx or other systems. One business I spoke to had an add-on which came with their ERP system.

3) along with the groups I mentioned already, here's another 3 http://siteanalytics.compete.com/fendza.com+helloscheduling.... some of these guys have been at it a long time. I'll admit that I think most of these are poorly designed, but that can't be the only problem.

I don't expect you to read this comment and just give-up. That would be lame. But I do hope to open your eyes a bit, maybe you'll see another opportunity in a related space, or this comment will help you somehow.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Support or bugs go to support@schedulingapp.com. There's a support link in the bottom right of the app as well.

I think you'd benefit from replacing the screenshot of the "my office scheduling" page on the homepage, with an explanatory graphic. The text there is too small to read, but I found myself squinting to make it out to try to glean the features I could expect from the product. As an example, I cite Highrise's homepage: http://highrisehq.com/, where icons and descriptive text are used to better present what I can do with the application.

I think that having two metrics of plan/pricing levels is confusing. I'd like to purchase by users in my office, but I don't care how many gigabytes of storage space it costs you. It's also not clear exactly what counts towards that storage quota. Will you be tallying the space used by my calendar events in your database? Will there be a feature where I can upload large files to share with appointments? I couldn't find an explanation of why I'd want to pay for storage space anywhere. Once this is defined, maybe an add-on of 'n' gigabytes of addon storage can be purchased for those requiring the additional space- but right now it just appears to be one more thing to confuse someone about to make a purchase.