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Requested design updates to the Upwork Desktop App

lenaellis
Community Member

We’ve made several improvements to the Upwork Desktop app to help you stay organized and provide more insight into the Time Tracker’s processes by displaying more notifications about what the app is doing on the backend. Let us know if you have any questions on the updates below.

 

Time Tracker Layout and Settings-

 

  • “Time today” - shows billable time tracked in your local time zone, not in UTC. However, “Time this week” still shows the weekly billable time in UTC because our weekly billing is calculated in the UTC time zone.
  • There is a connection status above the ON/OFF toggle informing you if the Time Tracker is online or offline.
  • We removed the elapsed timer which increased each minute, and replaced it with a timer which increases in 10 minute intervals after a screen capture is taken and the time is registered as billable.

TImetracker2.png

  • At top of the time tracker, we are now showing the contract name, contact person and client company.
  • Because your time tracked is now showing in your local time on the main page, when a new billing week is approaching (in UTC) and after a new billing week has started, we are showing a notification to avoid confusion.

TImetracker3.png

 

Improvements in offline tracking:

 

  • If the app loses connection with the server, the app will now display a notification on the screen until you dismiss it or until the connection is back.

Timetracker4.png

Timetracker5.png

  • When you’re approaching the caching limit, you will see a notification.

Timetracker7.png

  • And once the app is back online, we show a notification and start uploading the cached screen captures.

Timetracker8.png



111 Comments
2a05aa63
Community Member
  • We removed the elapsed timer which increased each minute, and replaced it with a timer which increases in 10 minute intervals after a screen capture is taken and the time is registered as billable.
  • Because your time tracked is now showing in your local time on the main page, 

Ugh, why? I work after midnight quite a lot, now I'm just confused how much did I work; I have to manually calculate the duration of a session each time. Unless this is some woodoo to work more hours, I want the old timer back. Local time doesn't matter, since I work with clients of different timezones.

muhh
Community Member
  • “Time today” - shows billable time tracked in your local time zone, not in UTC. However, “Time this week” still shows the weekly billable time in UTC because our weekly billing is calculated in the UTC time zone.

 

Inconsistent design that makes everyone confused and adds unecessary overhead that people need to calculate how much time they worked today per billing rules.

 

  • We removed the elapsed timer which increased each minute, and replaced it with a timer which increases in 10 minute intervals after a screen capture is taken and the time is registered as billable.

"WHY LISA WHY!!!"

 

 

I'm in a team of hundreds of contractors who relied on elapsed time feature in their day to way work. Please, bring this back. And please, next time the app development team thinks of removing something, consider conducting a survey.

lindaland
Community Member
Without showing elapsed time there is no way of knowing how much time has been tracked while offline. Or am I missing something?

The app always goes offline periodically even if I am connected but now without elapsed time, I have no way of knowing how much time has been tracked until it eventually catches up. Or am I just confused?

deschenko
Community Member
 

Please just return session time.

francesellen8
Community Member

The new Upwork tracker is so disorienting.

What was the reason you removed the elapsed time?

Please return the elapsed time.

 

I do my work in 10 min blocks and I have no way of checking how close I am to 10 minutes now that the minute timer is gone. 

It would be hellish to track it via an actual clock timer. Extra work. 

 

Please please return elapsed time.

Will it be possible to roll back to the old version???

 

researchediting
Community Member

@Lee M wrote:

So, if you start working at 2:10 and stop working at 2:45, technically, the client is paying for five minutes that you didn't work. If this happens six times in a week, the client is paying for half an hour more than the time you actually worked. Do you understand my logic? I relied on the elapsed timer to work as close to a full 10 minute block as I could. Do your tasks/jobs always work out to multiple of 10 minutes? I do understand that starting at :10 or :20, etc., will guarantee a full first segment, I guess I can try harder to start right on a 10 minute mark... I just wish I didn't have to change my habit (you know, being a human that doesn't like change...).


Clients could pay for non-working time in your example, unless they challenge segments based on half the activity. Both overpayment and underpayment are possible. 

 

@As Upwork actually works, synching our activity to 10-minute segments/cycles produces the most accurate and least challengeable work records. Now that @Petra has reminded us this is how the system works, I can adjust.

When I was doing this before, and not relying on the faux timer (eye candy), I actually found benefit in that I became more systematic and disciplined about timing my breaks as well as my work.

bwest_design
Community Member

First, the positive: I love having the latest screen capture included directly in the app, so I don't have to go double check the work diary if I missed the last screen capture notification. I also personally prefer having the time in local time, as I always end up changing it from UTC to local on the website and I like that it defaults to my time zone now. That said, I've seen some complaints from other uses here about this, and I think the ideal solution would be to make this totally optional. Let us choose whether we want to work in UTC or local time, as I recognize that everybody has their own systems that work for them.

 

One thing I do really miss is the little green bar that changes color as we're going through the work week and putting in more hours. This was just a nice quick visual indicator of how much work we've done for a client. It's a minor thing, as I know I can just look at the new "this week" indicator, but it would be nice to have both.

 

I am having one major problem since receiving another update last night (version 5.1.0.562), and that is that the app no longer remembers window positioning in Windows 10, and things just aren't showing up where they should be on my dual screen setup. It's making it difficult to work with the program at the moment, especially when the screenshot pop up doesn't show up where expected. I've emailed support directly about this but just wanted to mention it in this general feedback thread too.

firescue17
Community Member

Thank you for this most recent update. I'm not sure why someone was paid for this.

 

  1. The font size was made smaller and harder to read
  2. In a multi-monitor setup, the app appears all over the place on any window. The notifications and messages may appear on any other monitor with no relation to where the app is actually docked.
  3. The most bestest part, we now have more blessed popups which trigger as soon as one hovers over the selection, which then block the click for the selection one is hovering over.

Upworks UI is really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad.

 

Please don't ever use popups again on anything, ever. At all. It's obvious the dev team does not understand the purpose of tooltips.

 

PS: The UI is really bad!

kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Hi All,

 

We appreciate feedback and discussion on this thread and we have been sharing your observations with the team. We'll also move comments related to this update posted elsewhere in the Community to this thread to keep the discussion organized.

francesellen8
Community Member

Thank you for considering our feedback.

 

Also, if you're rolling out something as important as this, something that affects your users' income, you should have a comprehensive guide and change log of all the specific changes that were made. UI changes, time tracking changes, billing and invoicing changes. I searched your help pages but I could not find it anywhere.

 

I also work after midnight and I follow my client's timezone, so the change from UTC will be messing up the billing period. 

 

I still am confused about most things and it has ruined my old working method.