FreeBees.io buzzing along: how and why we created our own holiday tracker

Design Talk is the Product Design related set of articles outlining our projects’ life story at Dina. Thrilling discoveries, the destiny of our own internal products, intrigues and mystery solving –– all in our new series.

Since time immemorial, humankind across the Universe has only been able to use excel sheets for holiday management. The era of spreadsheets in leave management covered the Earth with a wave of inefficiency and administrative errors, and this catastrophe continued for centuries.

Leaving the jokes aside, holiday management has been and is a challenge for SMEs around the world. Of course, there is a variety of leave management tools and HR software to choose from, but no solution was able to meet all the requirements we had. Therefore, we decided to create our own great product.

So, which features did we miss in the existing applications? The thing is, Hungarian legislation has special rules about counting annual leave, and we found it useful to create an easy-to-use solution that follows these rules thoroughly to help SMEs in the country.

Product validation and the first prototype

As usual, we started with research to identify our potential target group, users’ needs, and pains. We created buyer personas as well — as we realised, we had two distinctive ones, a CEO and an HR manager. To be sure there was a real market need for the product, we did online market research and concept testing as well. The feedback was positive so we decided to develop a product for the Hungarian market.

Having the first prototype at hand and testing it with potential users, we discovered that they would gladly stop holiday tracking via medieval paper-based forms and would rather switch to our solution. We were happy to move forward with our first version, seasoning it with new functionality suggested by the majority of potential users.

We had an essential feature set to start with: users could access a monthly overview of their whole team’s days off, submit and approve holiday requests online, create reports in a few clicks, make holiday counts and store personal information with a private account or company details with a business account.

FreeBees, as we started to call our product, complied with all Hungarian eligibilities and regulations, some of which are quite specific in Hungary unlike the other EU countries.

A workflow: design and development

The original project scope ended up being extended after the first beta testing, based on research and users’ feedback.

When you collect feedback from users and convert its essence into tasks, the backlog turns into a portal to hell — an abyss of tasks and ideas for improvements. You won’t complete them till the end of your life, not even in your next incarnations. The super-ability to prioritise functions based on user needs is a key here. If this is done, you only need to determine the deadlines and you’re good to go.

Coordinating an internal project with client work was another challenge. Our faithful and devoted FreeBees stayed alive no matter what client projects appeared. We had a dedicated team contributing to the project with no trace of a ROI just yet.

I must admit that given the product’s “free” nature, it wasn’t coordinated as well as any of the top priority client projects, and a lack of certain project goals was somewhat discouraging for the team, but given the circumstances, we couldn’t run things differently.

A sizeable amount of extra time was spent on preparing the application for market release, and in the end, we let our ‘free bees’ fly out to the world. Our marketing team created a Help Centre with articles covering all the essential features a new user may need to discover.

I am pleased to state that we have already fulfilled some of the sales goals: our first clients started using the app and provided us ideas about how to improve it as well.

Full redesign

Freebees.io has a face: it’s the face of a nice, caring, young, and friendly person. This person interacts with the world in their own manner, using a visual language that demonstrates their values directly.

In the beginning, we had the impression that Freebees as a brand wasn’t attractive enough, so we fully redesigned it. Even to the naked eye, it’s quite clear that the interface design got upgraded in every aspect: we changed the colour palette, the components, the patterns, the logo, the typography, and even introduced a dark theme.

Furthermore, we took into account the fact that Freebees can save time and resources not just for whole companies but on team, or department level as well. Thus, we defined 3 types of accounts: now you can use the app as an employee, a team lead, or an administrator.

Now our clients use the current version of Freebees, not a redesigned one. But in future the upgraded version will be disclosed to the world, too.

At the moment, Freebees offers functions that small or medium teams need. However, we are continuously improving it and add new features based on customer feedback.

My insights

Here are a few important lessons I’ve learned from the project:

• You may attract some users, even with a niche product like Freebees (remember, it was initially created for the Hungarian market only), but it can’t shoot without a strong brand, a well-organized and precise marketing team, and sales. We have learned this and improved our performance on the fly.
• A thought-through, realistically estimated scope of software development can prevent letting the team down financially and emotionally. This is true even though it’s almost impossible to fully predict the scope when it’s an MVP in the beta phase, being tested and feedbacked by beta testers only.
• While testing the beta version with users, prepare your tech team to support you in real-time. A few technical surprises made us blush in front of the respondents during usability testing, our developers had to fix the technical malfunctions almost immediately.
• It was a pleasant surprise when we ended up attracting a few clients beyond our assumed target audience.
• It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, so it’s fine to collect some mistakes and to learn from them.

I feel proud that Digital Natives gave birth to and brought up such a beautiful [redesigned] child as FreeBees 🤍