AIR APPLICATION CONCEPT
Worktime
Eugene, Oregon. 2008.

Coffee houses, volunteer efforts, supermarkets, restaurants - what do they have in common? They all have people working shifts, and that means someone has to create and manage those shifts. Worktime is an internet application that does just that.

Here's how it works, we'll use a cafe to illustrate: First, the cafe owner (Team Captain), publishes the shifts she needs covered on worktime.com. Meanwhile, her employees (Team Members) log in to worktime.com and input the days and times they are available to work, and also when they prefer to work. From these two sets of data, the possible schedules can be created and ranked. Next, the Team Captain chooses from those schedules, or creates her own. When she makes her decision, the team is notified, and now comes the beauty part: it is then the team's responsibility to check their schedule and fine tune it by communicating with each-other at Worktime.com.

At that web address, team members ask their peers to cover for them, or to trade shifts. These communications are elegantly and swiftly transferred from team member to team member because Worktime.com is not a website, it's a rich internet application written in Adobe Flex. This means that Worktime is agile and easy to use. The application responds to user input immediately and never needs to be refreshed or reloaded, just like a desktop application.

Worktime empowers its users to control their work schedule without causing problems. That is its basic functionality, but the application can do much more. Worktime can also facilitate communications between employees at different physical locations, and even different companies. This bold move, in addition to its superior design and platform, gives Worktime the potential to displace searchable resume database sites like craigslist or monster.com by being a better resource to shift workers and employers alike. In other words, Worktime has the potential to provide professional networking in the way that MySpace and Facebook provide social networking. Yet, unlike those social networking sites, Worktime is a sleek Flex RIA that is easy to use.

Our goal is to create applications that are effortless to use. Only such applications will truly advance our species. Worktime is built on Adobe's AIR platform.