Upcoming KeepMeBooked features

We've now released most of the features which were on my last "upcoming features" list (and some which weren't on it). Here's what the list looked like then:

• Automated guest emails (to acknowledge payments, chase for balances, etc.)  DONE 2 Feb
• Colour-coded bookings (to distinguish between paid / unpaid, online / manual, etc.) DONE 4 Feb
• Allow part-payment for online bookings DONE 5 Feb
• Apply rules to online bookings (e.g. minimum stay) DONE 5 Feb
• Export your data to a spreadsheet DONE 9 Feb
• More sophisticated pricing (by day of week DONE 10 Mar, single/double occupancy, etc.)
• Automated discounting rules (e.g. "with x days to go, discount prices by y%")

As well as those features marked "DONE" above, we also released these features in that period:

• See booking details by hovering over booking on calendar
• Allowing rooms to be closed off (e.g for maintenance)
• Full year availability view

Here are all the posts announcing these feature releases over the past few weeks.

'Automated discounting' we've pushed back in the schedule, we've found some other features seem more important to our users.  So here's the updated list of features we'll be rolling out over the next 4-6 weeks:

• Occupancy discounts
• Option of setting changeover day for weekly bookings taken online
• Better reporting (revenue and occupancy over past week/month/etc.)
• Refer-a-friend program (to earn free months for referring your friends)
• More flexible extras (charging per item; varying extras pricing by season)
• Multi-room version of booking widget (to allow guests to book multiple rooms online)

Not seeing your pet feature? Now is the time to tell us about it on our GetSatisfaction forum.

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New feature: set prices by day of week

We added the ability to set your room prices by day of the week.

On the rooms screen, you could previously have prices vary over the course of the year (by setting up seasons in Settings -> Setup Seasons). Now you see these new options which allow you to vary prices over the course of the week:

As ever, we try not to trouble you with extra complexity if you don't need it, so the default setting is just to have prices the same all week. But if you do need extra flexibility, you can click on 'Midweek/weekend' to reveal two pricing levels like this:

Or 'Day-by-day' to set different prices for each day of the week:

Next up is "occupancy discounts", e.g. reduced rate for single occupancy of double room.

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Browser speed test on KeepMeBooked (Chrome not fastest)

I just ran a simple speed test on KeepMeBooked using four different browsers. In each case, I timed how long it took to load a new month in the KeepMeBooked calendar:

Opera wins hands-down at 2.4seconds (I ran the test five times on each browser and took the average).

Chrome and Firefox slightly slower (although I couldn't tell until I pulled out a stopwatch). IE8 lagging horribly.

With more and more software moving online and web pages becoming much more complex, browser speed is going to become more and more important. And, crucially, people will start to learn that their choice of browser is just as important as their internet connection speed.

I just can't imagine that in 12months time, 60% of people will still tolerate Internet Explorer, when it means everything happens so much slower.

Of course, we can't much influence what browser our customers use, so we will still work hard on getting our calendar view to work faster in IE, but boy would our IE customers have a better experience if they just switched browsers. For the time being, we just show IE customers this message:

******
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New in KeepMeBooked: Full year overview

We've just deployed a new addition to KeepMeBooked: Year View. This opens a new tab with an overview of all bookings and rooms for the entire year, like this:

You'll find it under a new menu option "Reports":

where we will soon by adding more reports (revenue, occupancy etc.)

******
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Remote user testing with UserTesting.com

Just used UserTesting.com for the first time. UserTesting.com is a service where you can ask a user to complete a specific task and watch how they get on. They are instructed to think aloud, just like in a face-to-face usability test, so you can get an understanding of why they did something. But it is much easier to organise than face-to-face testing as you don't have the hassle of recruiting testers to come to the office, making sure they turn up, giving them cups of tea and so on.

It worked very well. User didn't have much difficulty with the tasks, which is both good and bad. Obviously we want people to find KeepMeBooked easy to use, but the point of testing is to reveal the bad/difficult areas, just happened that this user pretty much flew through the tasks. There were a couple of small things we can improve on though:

 - The login fields are too short, user had to scroll to check he hadn't mistyped his email
 - When adding seasonal pricing to an existing room, the room rate for the newly-created season has the wrong default.
 - User didn't always notice status updates confirming that a change had been saved.

And reminded me how slow the calendar refresh is in IE8. It is about 2-3x faster in Chrome or Firefox. Not easy to fix, that one.

Here's the screencast of the test if you'd like to see it:





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More detailed tour pages

We are working on a number of ways to show you more about KeepMeBooked before you sign up. Even though it only takes a few moments, and is free, signing up is still an extra hurdle you might not want to cross until you have learnt a little more about KeepMeBooked.

As part of this effort, we have just launched four new pages of tour information.

And we will shortly have some more demo videos to watch, plus we are looking at providing a way to try KeepMeBooked for real without even signing up for an account.

******
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New in KeepMeBooked: close off rooms for maintenance

You can now mark a room as unavailable on the calendar. This will change the background grid to grey, and won't display the room in your online booking widget.

Process is similar to creating a booking. Just click and drag across the dates you want the room to be unavailable for, and select "Mark as unavailable":

This will open a further screen where you can add a note (which only you see) or edit the dates of the maintenance period (useful if you need a period longer than two weeks, i.e. longer than you can drag on the calendar)

Once created, the calendar grid shows grey where a room is unavailable, and you see your note when you hover over it:

Just click anywhere on the marker to reopen and edit it.

******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management