Today we received the copy of Laura Leist’s new book Eliminate the Chaos at Work and found Doodle mentioned in there. The whole page about Scheduling Meeting refers to the Doodle Survey on Scheduling Trends that we conducted in October 2010.
Doodle's technology landscape
April 14, 2011We are asked about the technology landscape at Doodle from time to time, reason enough to talk about it in our blog. The operating system (OS) of our production servers is Debian (a Linux flavor). Our database management system (DBMS) is MySQL. Recently, we started using MongoDB as well; if MongoDB keeps its promises, and so far it does, we will slowly but steadily persist more and more pieces of information with MongoDB and fewer and fewer with MySQL.
Doodle is basically a Java application and Tomcat its web container. For the time being, we still use Tomcat 6 but are going to switch to Tomcat 7 soon. However, when browsers (or API clients such as our Android app) send requests to doodle.com, they do not directly interact with one of the Tomcat instances but with one of our Apache servers. The Apache servers are responsible for balancing the load and for delivering static content (e.g., images) without having to involve any of the Tomcat instances.
In the back-end, we heavily rely on Hibernate for O/R mapping between Java’s object model and MySQL’s relational model and are waiting for Hibernate 4 to become JPA 2 compliant (Doodle, that is, not Hibernate). In the front-end, we heavily rely on jQuery. And in addition to the Java SE 6 APIs provided by the Java runtime environment and the Servlet API 2.5 (soon 3.0) provided by Tomcat, we use quite a few third-party libraries, many of which are sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation.
Finally, we are learning Scala (well, yours truly is). The switch from Java to Scala is not going to happen anytime soon (certainly not before Java 7 and maybe not before Java 8), but this language made in Switzerland is exciting.
by Paul E. Sevinç, Doodle CTO
Further calendar integration: Exchange and improved ICS
April 7, 2011
Doodle’s calendar integrations are taking their next step: We have improved our ICS support that allows read access to calendars that provide ICS feeds in order to display appointments in Doodle and vice versa.
And we have made it possible to directly connect to Exchange servers: the new Exchange integration will provide an alternative to our client-side Outlook connector for those who work in an exchange environment. It’s still in public beta, and we’re looking forward to receiving your feedback and to finalizing the integration based on it.
Doodle starts French blog
April 5, 2011France is among the four countries with the highest number of Doodle users – together with the US, Germany and Switzerland. However, in the francophonic world the service spread by the word of month until now and the huge effort of volonteers enabled us to provide a French version. Thanks a lot to our French users!
As from today, we’ll run a French blog and we’ll reach out to bloggers and media in Molière’s country. These measures are intended to support to get out the word about how easy scheduling can be and also lay the gounds to position Doodle as an advertising platform in France.
Read more in the French press release.
Doodle in Wikipedia
March 31, 2011We just discovered that Doodle now has its own article in the English version of Wikipedia. The article is still very basic and needs some more information to be supplied by the community, so please feel free to contribute!
Survey: mobile devices become efficiency tools
March 31, 2011Classic mobile phones are becoming extinct and smartphone users tend to be online more than an hour per day. Mobile devices evolve to tools for organizational tasks like the administration of the calendar, contacts and emails. And: users are more annoyed by websites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices than by mobile ads. These are the major findings of our survey on mobile usage that was answered by more than 1,400 Doodle users – and give clear signals to website operators.
The use of Doodle’s mobile versions is growing rapidly according to our records. That’s why we created this survey and it’s also why we’ve been quite surprised by the fact that so many users didn’t know about our mobile versions (see below). The survey was conducted in the US, Germany, Switzerland, and some other countries in March of this year. Here are the results in more detail:
Most respondents used a touchscreen smartphone (41%) followed by smartphones without touchscreens (36%) and “normal” mobile phones (23%) (see chart 1). Dominating among the smartphones was the iPhone (49%) and other major mobile systems included in the survey were Android (28%) and BlackBerry (11%).
Chart 1: What type of mobile phone do you mainly use? (N=1,425)
Almost all of the smartphone users also go online with their devices (95%) and 20% of the users with a traditional mobile phone. They spend an average active online usage time (without background tasks) of more than one hour per day (68 minutes) when waiting, at home, on the run, at work, and when commuting (see chart 2).
Chart 2: When do you most frequently go online with your mobile phone? (N=1,065; multiple answers possible)
Getting directions is the task that’s most frequently performed on the mobile phone (50%) compared to the computer or tablet (29%). About half of the respondents administer their calendar (56%) and contacts (55%) and read news (50%) on the mobile phone or equally on both the phone and the computer. Reading and answering emails has a high share of usage on phones and computers (42%). Task administration (54%) and the process of setting up Doodle requests (75%) are still mainly performed on the computer (see chart 3).
Chart 3: On which devices do you predominantly perform the following tasks? (N=1,052)
When asked about the most annoying thing about being online with a mobile device, the most frequent answer was visiting websites that aren’t optimized for mobile phones, which should be a clear message for companies with websites. Other drawbacks are more related to the mobile phones themselves or the network. Mobile ads don’t seem to be overwhelmingly annoying when surfing on a phone (see chart 4).
Chart 4: What annoys you the most when you're online with your mobile phone? (N=1,023; multiple answers possible)
Many respondents didn’t know about the mobile versions of Doodle (84%), which may explain their relatively low usage. The iPhone app (31%) dominates the different mobile versions and is followed by the mobile Web version (28%), the Android app (25%), and the normal Web version (16%) (see chart 5).
Chart 5: Which version of Doodle do you mainly use on your mobile phone? (N=296)
Three-quarters of the mobile users (76%) rated Doodle’s mobile applications as good or very good and only one-tenth of all respondents (9%) don’t think it’s important that Doodle offers a mobile version of the service. These results show us the huge potential of mobile Doodle and give us ideas about where changes can be made.
Redesign recap
March 15, 2011We’ve had tons of feedback ever since the redesigned version of Doodle went live. For the most part, the reworked user interface has been received very positively. Some users like the old design better and others had specific issues with the new design. Most of these issues were minor things that we were able to fix right away.
There is one piece of recurring feedback that has surprised us the most, and that is that Doodle polls are printed out frequently and users were missing this feature that had been moved exclusively to the poll administrator view. Many of them print out a poll to check availabilities in the personal calendar on the screen. Those users need to know that our calendar integration offers a much better way to get calendar data synced with a Doodle poll!
There’s no button to switch back to the old design and that’s the reason why we want to highlight three things in dealing with the new one:
- The print view has been given back to all participants of a poll.
- Wide polls are shown in the compact “accordion” view. There are technical reasons to restrict the width of a poll and the majority of users quickly get used to the extra click that it takes to enlarge it.
- Entries in the “name” field are not completely visible. We’re working on making the name row clearly visible on large polls as well, and we’d like to ask our users to insert only the name in the name field and to use the comment field for any additional information.
Did you notice that the blog is now in the new layout, too?
Redesign: biggest update in Doodle's history
March 8, 2011Today you get to experience the biggest update in Doodle’s history. This redesign is not only about changing how Doodle looks, but it also impacts the general user experience. Doodle is now lighter, faster, and more modern and dynamic thanks to the new Ajax-based user interface.
Here’s one of the first quotes from a beta user:
New beta layout is a great improvement. So much more user friendly.
What began as a redesign of our most used page (the poll participation page) ended up in a complete redesign of the site. All existing polls, meeting requests, and accounts, however, will remain unchanged.
You can see the new look for yourself, but here’s a detailed overview of the functional changes:
- In the participation page (view example) you can now switch smoothly between the tabular view and the calendar view. The usability has been improved, the poll header now contains all relevant information, the comment feature is more apparent, and it’s easier to edit existing entries. Participants can choose to be notified about any activity in a poll.
- The participation page has also been made fully accessible for screen readers for visually impaired individuals.
- The poll wizard has been redesigned and makes switching between setting up a poll using the calendar interface, the classic interface with dates and times, and the text poll for non-calendar options or multi-day events very smooth.
- The poll settings that enable the admin to adapt meeting requests to a specific situation are now part of the standard workflow instead of being in an extra menu.
- It is now much easier to close a poll and the admin can now select multiple final options that will be saved in the calendars of participants who connected them.
- The poll administration has been simplified.
- The option to schedule in the calendar view has become more present in the whole process making it even more attractive to connect the calendar.
- The home page looks completely different and displays the relevant information more clearly. Since Doodle is focusing more and more on scheduling and not opinion polling, the “Make a Choice” function (text poll) has been removed from the home page, however, it’s still available in the feature overview.
- The MyDoodle dashboard received an additional tab for MeetMe (one-to-one) meeting requests.
- The MyDoodle account management page now enables users to upload a personal avatar. The page has also been cleaned up to make it easier to manage your settings. The Premium Doodle account management page has been updated in a similar way.
- Last but not least, we also updated all of the static pages that contain additional information about Doodle.
Some of the chages that we made to make Doodle even easier will also impact the familiar way of using the service. You’ll find more details and tips in the dedicated section of our FAQ:
We’re looking forward to get your feedback and we also like positive reactions very much. Please contact our support if you need to get a question answered, but please be patient if we don’t reply immediately or if we don’t answer questions that are already covered in the FAQ (redesign section at the top).
Mobile phone user survey
February 21, 2011You don’t have to stop using Doodle when you’re on the run. By using your mobile device, you can respond to a meeting poll, initiate a poll, and see all of your polls at a glance. There are four different ways to use Doodle:
- Doodle’s mobile Web version – optimized for a smaller screen and a lower data rate
- Doodle for iPhone – the native iPhone app
- Doodle for Android – the native Android app
- Doodle’s full Web version
When you go to doodle.com or click on a Doodle participation link on your mobile phone, you are automatically redirected to the mobile version unless you have installed one of the native apps. In the upcoming months we will work to improve and enhance our mobile version and therefore want to ask you to give us feedback on how you use your mobile phone.
Please participate in our short survey and you could win one of ten free Premium Doodle subscriptions!
User survey: Outlook, Google, paper agenda
February 17, 2011Last month we asked our users to give us feedback about the way they use Doodle and their personal calendars. We were overwhelmed by the large amount of valuable feedback! More than six thousand (6,402) users went though all of the questions and provided us with very useful comments. Thanks to everyone who participated! This is very important to us because this interaction with our users helps us to be the leader in our market.
The main results from this most recent survey are summarized in the three charts below. More than four-fifths of the respondents use an electronic calendar either on a computer or on a mobile phone (see Chart 1). That also implies that around 15% of our users still use paper calendars.
Chart 1: Do you use an electronic calendar?
49% of the respondents have only one electronic calendar, 33% use two, 12% use three, and 6% have more than three electronic calendars (see Chart 2).
Chart 2: How many different calendars do you use?
Outlook (46%) and Google (17%) are the most common primary calendars ahead of the calendars on mobile phones and Apple’s iCal (see Chart 3). It was interesting to see the differences between North America and Europe. Whereas the Americans are much more into Google Calendar than the Europeans (21% vs. 11%), the Europeans are in the lead when it comes to using mobile phones for scheduling (16% vs. 9%).
Chart 3: What is your primary calendar?
About 10% of the respondents said that they connected their calendars with Doodle. More than half (56%) didn’t know this was possible. However, 95% of people who connected their calendars rate this feature positively (see Chart 4).
Chart 4: What do you think about the calendar integration with Doodle?
Other submitted comments were also very useful including multiple additions to our Calendar Connect wish list, different reasons why people didn’t connect their calendars to Doodle, and the fact that some users call themselves late adopters. Yes, Doodle is so easy to use and so deeply integrated that it is highly attractive to a very wide range of users. The traditionalists with paper calendars are even starting to change their ways. More than half of them are considering the idea of using an electronic calendar (73% in the US compared to 43% in Europe).
