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kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Updates to Work Diary: Feedback and Questions

Work Diary is getting some updates to improve the mobile experience and overall responsiveness. Check out the announcement here and let us know your thoughts about these updates as you log time in Work Diary.

~ Valeria
Upwork
79 REPLIES 79
decodistny
Community Member

Glad that the Work Diary is getting some attention!

 

Unfortunately, the new design has a major usability issue. The contract dropdown is too narrow, so contract titles are cut off. Also, the client's name is gone, which is a problem for similarly-named contracts. The risk of making a mistake is now much higher.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback, Jason. I'll go ahead and share your comment about viewing contract titles and clients' names with the team.

~ Valeria
Upwork


Valeria K wrote:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback, Jason. I'll go ahead and share your comment about viewing contract titles and clients' names with the team.


Valeria, I want to second this. I NEED to client name in the Work Diary drop down. Especially if you do similar work for all clients, it makes it very hard to figure out which one is which. 

Same here. Gotta be able to see the client's name in this drop-down (not just the title of the contract). 


Amanda L wrote:


Valeria, I want to second this. I NEED to client name in the Work Diary drop down. Especially if you do similar work for all clients, it makes it very hard to figure out which one is which. 


Thirded (for fourthed, not sure). I rarely pay attention to what the contract names are, and many of them are very similar. I need the client names in the drop down to find the right page. This is unusable.

 

ETA: the only way to know which work diary is which is to navigate through the contract page.

I appriciate the effort to improve the UX!

However there are things I really miss from the prev design

- ability to see big enough screenshots on the "Screenshot details" page, i.e. after you click on the tiles with the screenshot previews, the modal window that gets opened is very narrow and the screenshot on it is very small therefore

- it was possible to go to a next/prev screenshot in that "Screenshot details" page using your keyboard's left/right arrows. Now I have to close the modal and click a new tile.

deschenko
Community Member

Completely unusable. I worked without stopping for 70 minutes, and this is represented by four groups some of which include 1 or 2 segments. What purpose does this serve? I miss the compact view without screenshots where you could easily see the size of sessions (shifts).

Thanks for sharing your feedback, Igor.

 

Logged time is now grouped based on continuous sessions with same memos and/or activity code. So changing a memo and/or activity would start a new group. In general, these changes were made to modernize and optimize the Work Diary page so that it could be used from any type of device, including mobile devices, and was consistent with the rest of Upwork's pages.

~ Valeria
Upwork


In general, these changes were made to modernize and optimize the Work Diary page so that it could be used from any type of device

 Breaking user experience in the name of  making the user interface look (but not perform) well is awful.   Could we at least have the old way made available while you guys are tweaking and figuring out what you want to do to "modernize" with the new design please?

mbusel
Community Member

Hello Upwork,

Yesterday, I discovered that new Work Diary looks like the following. From my point of view, it is really bad idea, because it is obvious that day consists of hours and each hour consists of six 10-minutes sections.  The new look is a mess of 10-minutes screenshots.

wd.jpg

 

Is it possible to switch that to old look?
owd.png

 

Best regards,

Maxim

Hello Maxim,

 

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. We will pass this along to the appropriate team for review. If you have other thoughts you wish to share, please feel free to do so in the community forum discussion here

 

Thank you.

Pradeep

Upwork
brevon
Community Member

Hi,

 

I appreciate the efforts but I do not understand why Uprwork always jumps into revamps without asking among users first which features we find most handy, which functionalities we most depend on, how we use the tools and what we consider troublesome, before such major revamps are made. I cannot appreciate nice graphic redesign if it takes away usability and practicability. Long time issue with UW is you guys take a top down approach that proved so many times disasterous - especially with the UW app, but now also WD and that instead of seeking our opinions actively and making it easy to share them, you just throw something out and then wait for us to give you all this feedback, which means I am now donating you 40 minutes of my time I could have been working, trying to sum up all you should have gathered another way a long time before the changes were drafted. Obviously, this doesn't make anyone very happy.

 

I see so many newly introduced issues with the new redesign. The most serious include dropdown menu of billing codes when editing billing codes from WD website and the overview of my working sessions on WD, see details below.

 

Billing codes: my contract's nature results in dozens (nearing hundred) codes avaliable in the drop-down menu to choose from. Whenever I need to edit a segment, I need to do more steps than before to be able to do so. And worst of all, I can no longer SEARCH through the codes using cmd/ctrl+F, which is a must for such a long list. Most of the codes are very hard to distinguish, so the safest way is to copy them from the job I am working on and using the search to find the particular code in the drop-down list. Now this is no longer possible: whenever I click on the drop-down menu and then hit cmd+F, the dropdown menu collapses again! So, the only way to edit the code is MANUALLY scroll through those dozens oftentimes very similar, hard to read and mostly unmemorable codes to find the exact match for the one I need. This makes what used to be a few second's task something that takes precious minutes!

 

- compact overview of segments I worked in one sitting - I used to have a very clear visual overview of how many breaks there are in my day and how long were my segments I worked at one sitting. Now my billed time is broken into groups based on billing codes and not on the segments worked at one go. Well, this grouping could very well be added to the Reports overview, but in WD it makes no sense.

 

- editing of individual segments: very complicated!

1) I need to remember that the box is invisible, so I randomly run over the space below windows of tracked time until the box appears.

2) I click it

3) I scroll to the top of the website and click on Edit

4) I click on the dropdown menu

5) I search manually for the code I wish to use

6) I click save

 

Are you sure this couldn' be done in fewer steps and with the possibility to just start typing the first letters so that the menu would automatically filter the codes based on what I start typing?

 

- the little screenshots in WD - well, they are so tiny that they do not serve any purpose like that. It would make much more sense to offer the two views as before: one just list with clear overview of segments based on time, not codes, and another view with large thumbnails that would actually pertain some details so that they were of any use and these could be grouped based on codes as long as we could also have the time-based grouping.

 

Thanks for considering all the above, most of which is crucial for uninterrupted workflow.

kobor
Community Member

Can we get back the old one right now? I'd pay for it. Oh, wait, i already do it.

I have 6 or 7 contract with the same title, how i'm supposed to know which is picked, if you don't show the client name?

Plus its really horrible, why change something what works ?

otrrtw
Community Member

The Work Diary display too broken up and its hard to see if you have gaps in your time.  The Previous display was great.   You could see all your time layed out in single 1hours lines.  I do a lot of video meeting so there I have a lot of time gaps becuase I dont not have any key strokes, so I have to enter manual time.   The manual time drop down now simply removes the times from the list that have already been tracked.  Before you could see all but the time tracked was marked in grey and not accessable.  Both of these fetures of ceated a clean visual and easy user experience.  The new design is complicated to read and unorganized.  Checking to make sure I have tracked time correctly is much harder and requires a much more detailed review.  Please go back to the old display.  

joechiu
Community Member

Please give us an option to change how to select the project.

I carry about 10 active clients/projects.  Unfortunately, there is a significant tendency for my clients to use very similar sounding names for their listings and I cannot tell them apart anymore:

 

The drop-down looks something like:

 

Bake Birthday cake
Bake a special cake
Bake and Decorate Wedding Cake
Bake and decorate a cake
Baker
Baking specialist
Cake decorator
Decorate a cake
Make an awesome cake for an event
Select cake decorations

 

What is worse is that the dropdowns truncate the description so that it looks more like

Bake Birthday ca
Bake a special c
Bake and Decorat
Bake and decorat
Baker
Baking specialis
Cake decorator
Decorate a cake
Make an awesome
Select cake deco

 

I absolutely cannot use this.  I have already found myself logging time to the wrong project.

 

Please make this configurable so that I can see the client name first, or allow us to attach a nickname (job code) to projects!

leticia_roser
Community Member

Spoiler
 

I almost never get involved in these community forums, but please, we 100% need the client name on the work diary. Clients all tend to name their projects with generic descriptors like "analysis and report" so the names all look the same - it makes it very difficult to find the right job you want to charge hours to without the client name!

firescue17
Community Member

It sucks.

 

It's a space-wasting, screen gobbling monster.

 

And why?! At what point has the Community clamored outrageously for an[other] overhaul to a feature that was working perfectly fine as intended?!

 

Stop messing with stuff.

 

In closing, thank you for locking the Announcements thread. ETA please disregard this last sentence. I now see the announcement about changes to the forums.

I totally agree with all the other opinions above.

In addition, the timezone selector is hidden behind a clueless icon.

And what is worse - it still (already 5 or 6 years) defaults to UTC and 12-hour format.

 

Unless I live in the United Kingdom, it is 100% certain that I want to use my local timezone instead of UTC. Why is it so difficult and takes years to make the "Mine" option default ?

 

Even more - Upwork already knows my country and even my town from my profile. It is super easy (and quite user-friendly) to default to the time format that is official in my country (which in my case is 24-hour) instead of always using the 12-hour format.

 

Discussion Item: Since when do hours contain 80 minutes?

Discussion Item: Below is a color-coded sample of hours worked on a single contract for today,  beginning at HH:00 and ending at HH:59. The layout is nonsensical and just simply terribly bad.

 

Work Diary Abomination.png

dhezza_vhaldz
Community Member

Hello Valeria,

 

Update looks good, however I hope you could bring back the compact version where there's an option to choose the view without the screenshot, it's easier to check the activity levels. Also, I don't understand how the screenshots are grouped. The previous version, which was per hour, is better and looks better, to be honest.

 

Seeing my fellow freelencers' feedback, I could see they prefer the previous look and features of the Work Diary. I hope you'll bring t back. Thank you!

 

All the best,

Rodessa

muhh
Community Member

For those with full time contracts, we do need the classic representation of the work day as timeline vs. activitiy to track our schedule and breaks with ease. The new version is not a diary but work notes in this regard and is very inconvenient.

 

I agree with what Pavla said, it's hard to believe that the new UI would be supported by the end users (freelancers) if they were asked about it prior to its rollout.

d00g
Community Member

Agree with Pavla and Dmitry. I would suggest that you use a responsive design for mobile devices and revert back to the old UI for desktops which works well while the new one is a disaster from the usability point of view. 

alyona_che
Community Member

Completely agree with Pavla and Dmitry. It is so difficult to use, even the color is so hard to perceive, green was much better and understandable.

List view was perfect too...

Please, bring the old work diary back! 

Agree with Pavla, Dmitry, Damian and others. Just accidentaly deleted 30 min of group instead of 10 min. 

This look and functional just raise anxiety in general. And it has impact to contributor productivity as well.

Please bring back previous version.

kochubei_valeria
Community Member

Hi All,


Many of you requested an option to select client's name in addition to the contract name in the Work Diary. We understand that it's an important option to have, especially for talent who have multiple contracts with similar names. Our engineering team is working on adding this option to the new design.

~ Valeria
Upwork

"especially for talent who have multiple contracts with similar names"

It's not simply that the names may be similar. They are not memorable. In my earlier example, decorate a cake and cake decorator are not similar in naming, but equally useless in distinguishing which contract is which because they are just so unmemorable.

No, the problem is not just the names, there are many problems, like hard to see gaps, then i can't bloody navigate from one screenshot to the next one, need to close window, click on next.
Come one, doesn't even have the same functionality like the old one
I'm not even even talking about the fact that i have a display resolution of 1920x1200 on a 24" monitor, yet, i have to scroll because i'm being presented info in 300x2000 pixel box .
We are not mobile users, who works from his phone ?

Its important to get back the old one

Hi Valeria,

 

I am not sure if you noticed but 44 people (and counting) are waiting for some action or at least a reaction regarding the newly introduced bugs and functionality errors and deterioration of usability of WD. To sum it up for your convenience, apart from the client's name, we are also missing:

 

- old timeline view (or "classic representation of the work day as timeline to track our schedule and breaks with ease" as Dmitry aptly put it)

- possibility to fluently navigate from one screenshot details window to the next one

- simple two–step way to change the billing codes

- possibility to use ctrl/cmd+F when searching the drop-down menu with the billing codes

- drop-down menu filtering by typing first letter of the billing codes - something you managed to implement in the UW app, so you get the gist I hope...

- larger thumbnails in the thumbnail's view

- larger/adjustable screenshot details window

- the old bright green color

- actively seek contributor's/users' opinions prior any major update of the tools - especially if it includes removal of a bunch of features and functionalities

 

All in all, I cannot stress enough how frustrating the communication with UW is every time the development of these tools is concerned, how it never stops amazing me that users' opinions regarding the users' tools barely matters to UW prior the elimination and removal of features we need and that we use on daily basis, how tedious and frustrating it is to make UW understand our point and last but not least, why on Earth, indeed, UW tailor this tool for mobiles, when nobody indeed works from a mobile.

adehm
Community Member

This new interface does not work on firefox. I can't accept /decline invitations anymore. The interface now is on the right side instead of left and buttons are missing. I find this very disorienting and can't figure out how to use the site anymore.

Hi Valeria,

Any update on this?  It's been a week -- surely enough time for the urgent fix to just add the client name?

Thank you.

manilsson22
Community Member

Hello,

 

I am usually not active in the community discussions but this time I'll make an exception because I find the changes highly impractical and agree 100 % with the criticism raised by Pavla and others.

 

I especially want to stress how detrimental it is to remove the overview timeline page that allowed us to conveniently see all the 10 minute slots logged during a particular day and how long each workshift was. This will make it much harder for me because I do much of my work on upwork for a client who requests me to only bill time spent working one consecutive hour or longer. Before just by checking the overview page for each day when doing the weekly time log review you could within an instance notice if there was for example a lonely 10-minute slot that had accidentally sneaked into the diary (and thus delete it). Checking for this now will take ages because you have to look at the time logged for group by group of 10-minutes slots with similar billing codes and count the time to see that each group belongs to a block of at least 1 consecutive hour, especially complicated if you have spent for example a day of changing billing codes every 10 or 20 minutes. Would it really be impossible to bring this feature back at least as an option for those of us wanting to keep it?

 

It's really a shame that you roll out a change like this without asking for feedback first instead of just throwing it out and wait for the reactions. Are there really many mobile users who requested this change for example? The amount of people working from a mobile on the platform should be very small compared to the rest of us working from pc:s. 

alyabikhov
Community Member

I'm a pretty rare community writer. But the new work diary design made me drop a message here. 

Eliminating clients' names is an awful decision. I have a lot of contacts with similar names. Adding hours to the work diary got so challenging!

Do something.

 

jennifervh
Community Member

Hi there, thanks for providing a section on feedback to new features.

 

It looks like pretty many others are having the same experience as me - I really need the client name in the dropdown box to see who I'm billing my time to. This is what the list looks like for me with only the job/contract name. For 5 of the 7 projects it's impossible to know what project I'm billing without going several screens in to find which project belongs to which client. And then I feel I have to check and triple-check I'm billing the right person.

jennifervh_0-1636316581979.png

 

Thanks,

Jennifer

georgejonesiv
Community Member

The new Work Diary is god awful. It makes no sense to have it like this. Is there an option to get the old view back??? 

 

Next time Upwork wants to tinker with how things look and work, maybe invest in UI/UX testing? I've been doing UI testing for a number of years and I would have sent this back within 10 seconds. Sometimes things are good enough that they don't need to be messed with.

georgejonesiv
Community Member

Just to be a bit clearer on this:

 

One of my clients split my work into two separate contracts. Today I have the task of having to go through my time billed in Upwork and adjust the time worked in his ticketing system to match my time billed. This has always been a bit of a pain because it's time consuming, but the way the Work Diary has been changed just made this task infinitely more difficult. The old WD game me an at-a-glance look into how much time was billed and precisely which blocks of time in a given hour weren't billed. I can then adjust the tickets to match it without much fuss. This new WD completely screws this up making the process take longer than it has to.

 

Also, clicking the screenshot doesn't give me a full-screen look at what was going on in a single step. Now I have to click on the screenshot, then click on it again to get to the full-screen version where before this was a single step. This might not seem like a big deal, but when you have to rebuild and document what was going on going through multiple screenshots, the extra step to get to the information you need gets very annoying.

 

This level of UI/UX change should have gone by us. At least a good number of freelancers should have been given the opportunity to beta these changes for feedback before dropping it on an unsuspecting workforce and we should have the option to roll back to the old version until you can make it more useable for us.

It seems Upwork developers don't know how freelancers use work diary 😀

tmcdos
Community Member

Soon or later, Upwork will frustrate us so much that a really upset developer will build a new frontend application (either Vue or React-based) that uses the Upwork's own REST API and then open-source it. Then other clever developers will start contributing and soon most of the freelancers will use this new community SPA (single-page application) instead of the Upwork's own UI.

kobor
Community Member

@Ivaylo : I'm up for that , IF i can redirect half of my fees to that developer..

The really interesting thing , that most of the people who complained in this thread are top rated .

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