Mies van der Rohe the architect is famously quoted as saying “less is more”.  While this saying has become fashion in Silicon Valley, in reality it’s hard to do.  As product designers at Presdo working to make our product better, we constantly strive to make things more powerful and simpler at the same time.  It is a sure sign of goodness when we can achieve the same things for users while removing something, since it makes our product easier to understand.

We made such changes recently by removing the time scroller part of our UI, a.k.a. the UI for picking a “best time” while creating events.

We’re here today to discuss this and other design changes and fill you in on Presdo’s design process.  These changes are subtle but important changes and we want our users to know about them and more importantly, why we did them.

Many users will know that you were able to pick a best time within a time window or choice of times when you create an event:

Even though it was a useful feature at times, we decided to eliminate the ability to pick a best time when setting the time for an event.

What this means now is that, like before, when you give a time window or a choice of times for an event, Presdo will make specific time suggestions to your guests within your time preference and collect their input about best times.

Why We Did It

First, we felt that there are more situations where it was actually more useful if the organizer did not pick the best time.

We’d like to illustrate this with an example.  Let’s say Henry is a small business owner who wants to use Presdo to schedule consultations with different clients at his office.  Henry does not care when clients come in, as long as they come in during on Thursday or Friday afternoon when he has set aside time for such visits.  It makes sense for Henry to give clients the first opportunity to pick a time within the time window he desires.

With the recent change to the way Presdo works, it’s now possible to achieve this; Henry enters a time window, “thu or fri afternoon”, for every meeting he wants to schedule and sends them off to his clients.  Each party picks the most convenient time for themselves.

Here’s what Henry’s guests will see when they reply:

As time slots for Thursday and Friday afternoon are filled, new clients will have only still-available time slots suggested to them during Thursday and Friday afternoon.  By removing the time scroller UI, we actually make Presdo’s behavior more useful for Henry.

Have we lost anything?  Not too much.  Some users already told us they would still like to pick a “best time”.  In fact, we believe that it’s not so much that they want to pick a best time as there are times that are not as good for them.  To get around this, you can still guide Presdo by being more specific about the times.  For example, you can enter individual time choices like “thu 2:30 or 4″ or time windows like “thu after 2:30 or friday afternoon” into Presdo.

New Time Entry Feedback

While we were at it, we also enhanced a feature that users told us they loved, which is a confirmation below the time text field showing what Presdo recognizes as you type it in:

New Guest Reply UI

We also simplified the user experience for guests by removing the “Suggest Another Time” button when they reply.  The “Yes” and “No” buttons are still there as before.  Of course, it’s still possible for guests to suggest another time, but now it’s part of deciding “yes” to the event instead of a totally separate action:

We believe this change will make it even easier for invitees to understand and interact Presdo.

By taking away some parts of the UI, we’ve actually made Presdo more flexible and powerful.

What do you think of these “less is more” changes?  Let us know!

Have you ever needed to coordinate a conference call, online chat, or Skype session with people in multiple time zones?  It’s a pain to calculate all the local times for everybody, especially with all that stuff related to daylight savings time.  And forget about it if someone wants to change the time!

It’s now so easy to deal with this situation with Presdo.

In the time editor, there’s a new checkbox called “Show local times to guests”.  Take a look:

Turn it on, and it shows you and your guests the local times happening for all guests for the event.

Let’s say you are on the west coast of the US, your friend Harry is in Paris, and Sally is in Hong Kong.  You want to schedule a conference call with them next Tuesday.  Here’s what enabling the checkbox would make the time of the event look like for you:

(6am is early, we know!)  And here’s what it would look like to Harry:

You get the idea!  Presdo shows the local times for you and everyone else involved in this event so you don’t have to do the math, and no one can complain they missed it by one hour!

Local times for guests can only be shown after they have been onto Presdo.  (You’ll see a message if some guests are new.)

So, do your part and invite them to that important meeting of yours using Presdo!

Presdo is looking for a few good engineers to join its team.  Looking at all the things we wanted to do this year, we decided we need help.  We’re planning to invest to take our product to the next level.

If you’re passionate about building great products with a great team of people, you’ve come to the right place. Check out our job posting on LinkedIn.

We are looking for talent in other areas too.  If you are an entrepreneurial product manager or product designer, drop us a note.

On March 11-13, the first-ever GTD Summit will take place in San Francisco, and noted speakers such as David Allen, Guy Kawasaki and James Fallows will be headlining the conference.  I’ve been invited to participate in the Summit and join several panels.

No doubt, many Presdo users are already familiar with GTD and its approach toward productivity, and many of our colleagues swear by it.  The whole idea behind writing things down and prioritizing as tasks come our way helps us focus on the most important things.

At Presdo, we are especially concerned about helping people organize their time.  Besides having spirited discussions about GTD and the technologies used to support GTD, I’ll have the opportunity to talk about how Presdo helps those who want to take advantage of GTD principles.

One of the several ways Presdo helps is by enabling people to “write things down” for meetings even if the time for them is still unknown.  For example, take a look at our “no time” event feature.  With this feature, you can make a note to yourself to meet with someone or a group of people at some point in the future, even if you don’t know exactly when.  Then, when there’s an opportune time to meet, schedule the event and send the event to them.

At the Summit, I’ll be showing more examples of how Presdo can be used to productively get things done.

If you haven’t registered for the Summit, contact us and receive a discount off the registration.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Eric Ly
Founder, CEO
Presdo

Today, we’re very pleased to announce that Ismael Ghalimi has agreed to join to our board of advisors and help us take Presdo to the next level.

Ismael is a well-known entrepreneur and executive here in Silicon Valley.  He is founder and CEO behind Intalio, the leader in the business process management (BPM) software platforms.  Besides being a passionate entrepreneur, Ismael is also a fervent industry leader and advocate in applying Web 2.0 technologies to business productivity.  Ismael writes a well-respected blog about business productivity, and he also created the Office 2.0 conferences.

I met Ismael several years ago when I was at LinkedIn.  Since then, I have gotten to know him through many conversations we’ve had on business and technology topics.  Ismael brings a great blend of strategy and entrepreneur passion to the table.  He has an uncanny ability to cut through the noise of everyday to distill inspiring yet actionable visions of the future.  His perspective will no doubt be great for business users of Presdo, for whom we intend to do much more.

Ismael and I have been discussing his involvement in Presdo over the last couple months, and we couldn’t be happier that he agreed to help out.

We both know that the challenge of Presdo is great, but so is our promise.  With Ismael’s help, we look forward to doing many great things for Presdo.

Eric Ly
Founder, CEO
Presdo

Do you travel?  Need to schedule an event during your trip that’s in another time zone?  Presdo now has much improved support for handling events in different time zones.

Let’s say you’re on the west coast, and you plan to travel to the east coast for a business trip.  You need to schedule a meeting for 10am EST with a business partner on the east coast.

Forget about having to do the math.  Just type “10am EST” when creating the event.  Presdo creates an event with a time of 10am, but the time will be 10am east coast time instead of 10am west coast time.  The event’s time zone is also set to the east coast time zone, which means all exchanges about times with your guest will be interpreted relative to east coast time.

If you are tracking multiple events with Presdo, and you have other events in west coast time and now a new event on east coast time, take a look at your upcoming events page:

See how Presdo keeps track of times in different time zones for you instead of confusingly shifting the times like on some calendars?

Presdo recognizes time zone designators after times, and it works for both US and worldwide time zones, including designators like “GMT+1″.

And there are a couple more ways to set an event’s time zone:

• Pick one from the time editor on the event page.  You can see a list of time zones for all worldwide locations.

• Pick a location for the event.  If the location is in another time zone, the event’s time zone is automatically changed to the time zone at the location.  It’s very cool.

While designators like “EST” are convenient for setting the time zone, they aren’t unique worldwide, so use the other ways if typing the designator isn’t working out for you.

There’s more information in our help on time zone support.

Can it get any easier?  Let us know!

A very happy new year to all of our loyal Presdo users.

This past year has been a very interesting year for our company.  The most important milestone was the launch of our product to the general public.  We had a lot to celebrate and to be proud of, and certainly, we are thankful for your interest and support of our company.

Recently, everybody has been talking about how the economic environment has made things more difficult on everyone.  Some of you may even be wondering if Presdo has “what it takes” to survive these difficult economic conditions.

I want to assure you that we are here to stay for the long term to fulfill the vision of helping people organize their time.  Given the reaction we have received over the last few months, we are convinced more than ever about the long-term value we will deliver.

From the beginning, we have prided ourselves in doing things differently.  In fact, since the time Presdo was launched, we received a great deal of feedback from you and learned a lot about how to make the product even better.  We have planned more than a full roadmap of enhancements for 2009.  And we will start talking about them soon on our blog.

This blog has been quiet the last few months.  (Hope we’ve been missed.)   But our team has been working long hours to set the stage for some major enhancements.  Some of the changes are already visible, while most are underneath the surface.  You’ll see the benefits of this work soon.

So from all of us, we want to wish you a very successful 2009.  And through Presdo, we look forward to making your life just a bit easier in the new year!

Eric Ly
Founder, CEO
Presdo

By popular demand, we’ve increased the number of active events per user to 50.  Users have told us they are keeping more and more of their lives on Presdo.  We don’t mind helping out.

The Presdo team has been busy the last few weeks getting new features ready.  Stay tuned for some exciting announcements this Fall.

For the last few months, we’ve been adding many features to Presdo that users have been asking for.  This week, we’re happy to announce the addition of a very useful enhancement that many have suggested—the ability to add web links inside the WHAT and messages of Presdo events.  Take a look!

Just paste in URLs from elsewhere and share other web pages with your guests!  It works as you’d expect.  ‘Nuff said.

Here’s a tip for making life easier with Presdo.  Have you ever wanted to convert an email thread to an event invite and include all your friends from the email?  We’ve made it easier to do it, with the new “Add guests” user interface in Presdo.

When creating the event, just pop open the “Add guests” box and add as many names and email addresses into the box as you want.  You can even copy and paste the entire block of email addresses from an email message–names and all–into the box.

Presdo will take care of matching the names to email addresses, no problem.  Can it get any easier?  Check it out!