Hey Designer News,

I'm the founder of Staffjoy, which is an application that helps businesses share work schedules in less time. Today we're launching the V2 of our application.

This past summer, we stalled in sales with the V1 of our application. Looking for answers, we decided to start doing user studies. Our core question was, "Why are a third of businesses still operating on paper or spreadsheet schedules?"

We brought in restaurant workers from Craigslist, did remote interviews, visited businesses for ethnographic follow-alongs, and more. We had a realization part way though: "holy crap! this is broken!"

For instance, step 1 for signing up for our V1 was supplying an email address. We found that, in restaurants, fewer than half of the kitchen staff usually had emails that they would provide to their managers. We talked to users and many of them were operating on prepaid phones.

The answer to our original question turned out to be that there is a communication problem. Managers still paper schedules because no apps reach their whole workforce. Then, the manager or a worker takes a photo of the schedule and shares it with the team.

With Staffjoy V2, we are still creating a scheduling app - but the core problem we are addressing is communication and engaging the workforce. So, we made it super easy to create a schedule, then we automatically communicate with the workforce over text message. Workers love it because they don't have to drive to work on a day off to see the posted schedule.

In the future, we plan to use this engagement to build workflows that bring more flexibility to the workforces, such as running shift swaps over text messages.

Finally, today we are announcing a $1.2M round of funding to fuel this vision.

If you have any questions, please let me know!

Funny, but how do you enable quirkiness like this at Google scale without creating tech debt and messed up template files?

I feel like the brand video needs an epilepsy warning

Mine has been a website since college. During job searches, having a central, up-to-date resume has been immensely helpful.

philipithomas.com/resume/

I prefer hosting on S3 because it costs almost nothing (~$3/mo for me), scales to virtually any traffic level, and has no technical configurations (like caching or server configs) that need tweaking.

https://www.philipithomas.com/practical-jekyll/

It's worth pointing out that Adobe is working fairly hard on an native-feeling CSS framework called Topcoat:

http://topcoat.io/

Yes - and their original responsive design excluded the sign-in button, making it quite a chore to access on my iPhone.

The author of that HTML&CSS book has a Javascript book in the same series that is currently available for pre-order:

http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-JQuery-Interactive-Front-End-Development/dp/1118531647/ref=bxgy_cc_b_img_b

This: http://imgur.com/nTCtDCz

It is coffee in a Chemex that I made while visiting my family for Christmas. Fun fact: The Chemex was featured as James Bond's preferred morning brew by Ian Fleming in From Russia with Love.