Show HN: Timeup.io – Find a suitable time slot for a meeting with your peers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Timeup.io – Find a suitable time slot for a meeting with your peers

start.timeup.io

36 pointstimeup34 comments

This does not solve the two issues I have with doodle:

- The creator is the only person with permission to add alternatives (both for their "Make a choice" and "Find a date" features)

- There's no way to limit the number of responses from each participant - e.g. each user need to select their 3 most preferred time slots.

Also this app, contrary to Doodle, requires you to select time slots, whilst with Doodle one can just decide on dates (and the time is optional). I also quite like the "Yes/No/If-needbe" feature that Doodle provides and I'm disappointed about the binary view of event planning this application takes.

Hey lordlarm, thank you with your valuable feedback and suggestions! We'll definitely will talk through them in our next meeting!

We'll assume you will be able to find a suitable time to meet with your team.

Kleinigkeiten:

- your url-structure is confusing (www.timeup.io vs start and landing)

- write "use timeup.io now" instead of "try"; add try once money is involved

- add small titles to the 4 bullets-list on event entry; right now they are very confusing; there is also too much white-space on desktop browsers; perhaps left-align the event-entry form on larger screens

- Slot Length should have an effect on Timeframe so one can start at 8:30 for example

- Text liest sich oftmals zu Deutsch (zBsp: "timeup.io focuses on the finding of the best fitting...") oder ist Englisch inkorrekt (zBsp: "Shoot a message!" müsste "Shoot us a message!" sein)

Grüße nach München!

Hello Dan, thank you for your answer! You're right there is still a need in optimizing the landing page. In fact the whole page was developed for a customer development course at university. So I really appreciate feedback on the psychological parts of increasing the "customer" base! Beste Grüße aus München :)

Please, explain the real and important differences with doodle.com

timeup.io focuses on the finding of the best fitting time spots for all event participants. On other platforms the event creator usually determines at which time slots an event should take place. Mostly, these time slots are the ones only the event creator can attend. So there is always a shift to inaccuracy. In addition, the design of timeup.io is very clean and intuitive. This allows an event creator or participant to be extremely quick on the creation or join process.

I read the FAQ but honestly couldn't understand the difference. As with doodle, event creator decides the only available dates and time range. And even if design is cleaner (subjective opinion) people presence group switching (gray/colored) is not so intuitive.

The "design is better" concept generally only works if the thing you're competing with is exceptionally bad in terms of design. I've found Doodle to be very easy to use, even for people who have very little experience with computers.

Personally, I think you're mistaken. Allowing anyone to propose a date outside of the control of the event creator can lead you to confusion for little or no benefit.

Personally, I think the value proposition is to avoid the long back-and-forth messages for finding a suitable time. This is not the same as finding the best fitting time spots for all participants.

from the FAQs: "On other event organization platforms usually the event creator determines at which time slots an event should take place. Mostly, these time slots are the ones only the event creator can attend. In addition, the design of timeup.io is very clean and intuitive. This allows an event creator or participant to be extremely quick on the creation or join process."

I had the same question but even if there is no real functional difference, a product can compete on less tangible factors. The market is full of competing products that all do pretty much the same thing. What are the real and important differences between gmail and fastmail or any other major webmail provider? Yet each has users who prefer that platform. There's room for more than one time picking service.

As many here will point out, there are very few really new ideas in apps.

It's a .io domain, not a .com, so it's more hip

If you help us finding a fitting name with a free .com domain I will hug you in person!!

Just a question, are .io's cheaper than .com domains?

No, they're a good bit more expensive. Around $10 vs around $35.

The main attraction is .io is shorter than .com, and .io is newer (maybe not in a practical sense, actually newer, but in terms of mindshare) -- so some domains that might have been taken/camped for decades on .com might be open on .io. Perhaps the higher fees also leads to a little less camping.

A few thoughts on the UX from my two minutes on the site.

When I created my event, the first thing I did was select a date in the calendar, before going down the page to fill in the other details. When I got to the bottom, the submit button was greyed out, which confused me. What had I missed? It was only when I scrolled back up that I saw that events require a title, which is confusing and frustrating.

The timeframe bit is confusing, too. First I'm asked to pick my slot length (let's say I choose a four-hour slot between 19:00 and 23:00, because I'm going to the theatre), but then I get some radio buttons asking for the same thing... and I've only got three options (15 mins, 30 mins, 1 hour). I've just told you I want a four-hour slot. Do these radio buttons override that? Confusing.

I found some of the UX elements a bit fiddly to use on my laptop, which slowed down the process. If the idea here is to have a really quick way to schedule meetings, I think things could be a lot clearer and more straightforward. The only thing you /really/ need to know is the date and time, right? Maybe I can add more information later if I really want to?

Now the problem is that there are multiple time managers that don't talk to each other. This needs a standard.

"I'll have my time manager call your time manager."

Since timeup is for free I think that a good way to go into that direction is to completely expose our API and make it publicly available.

Than everybody who wants can create addons for several kind of devices and other software. Right now the API is still very tiny and in my opinion it should stay like that. Only a very small selection of additional features will come.

So far our capacity (only 2 devs) is very very limited to support all kind of other software / devices in short time. (We're still students and doing timeup as a small side project - We saw the need of that tool when trying to organize meetings for learning groups)

Any other idea how to further support your idea?

Something related is going on with json and email with fastmail[1] -- a standard needs to bee free/open, and have a usable free/open implementation.

That way people can pay you for the convenience of a service, and not be afraid to be left in the cold once you move on to other things/get hit by a bus/get bought by doodle and they decide to fold your service etc.

Another example is Mozilla sync, which has a nice and viable self-hosting solution (both for the new and old sync)[2]. Not that Mozilla is charging for the sync service, but IMNHO they probably could - perhaps giving paying users a larger quota. Not that the free quota is a limit; more as a sensible way for users to support the project.

[1] http://jmap.io/ (Note that jmap is a reaction to a) the cruft that's been assimilated in IMAP, b) the need for webmail anyway (so rather than have what is essentially a http-to-imap proxy (squirrel, horde/imp) -- just have the mail server speak http).

[2] https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html

I've thought this[0] was interesting but haven't found time to play with it yet.

[0] https://www.cronofy.com/

iCal/caldav+rss?

I tried this out with a skeptical attitude, but the the process and UI impressed me -- it solves the specific problem minimally and works exactly as I'd want it to.

Thank you for your words! Please shoot a mail or comment if you have any unexpected experiences or are in need of any new features!

This was also pimped a couple of weeks ago — by the very same person ⌘ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9710357

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=timeup

When did the trend of actually demonstrating your product with images and feature lists die?

I agree, next time we'll post a link directly to the page! As soon our short explanatory video is done there is no need for a landing page in between. It will be available on the top right corner.

Please, include text + photos of the software in addition to a short explanatory video. Many of us prefer reading to needing to watch a video.

The horizontal bar at the top should have people's names, not numbers.

Would you like them to be always visible or when you are doing a mouse hover over the color? In addition, how would you solve the problem that there are multiple time slots where the number X of your peers can attend but at each of the different time slots it's a different subgroup of all attendees.

Is this similar to Calendly?

What about Meet by Sunrise

Meet by Sunrise is definitely also cool tool. I think the difference too them is still the hotspot way of seeing things. In the near future there will be also a keyboard for our "service".

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