If you own a business that requires your employees to spend a lot of time running around, keeping everyone connected and on schedule can be a hassle. Livetask is an app that lets you manage your team from your computer by scheduling tasks and sending notifications to  their cell phones.

With Livetask, you can see, at a glance, the weekly schedule for your entire team. If your team has GPS on their cell phones, you can locate a specific team member with a click of the mouse. After you assign a job to your team member, he or she can use Livetask to quickly send status updates back to you via email or text message.

It’s a neat concept, and I can’t find another company offering a similar service that’s really accessible to a wide variety of businesses. However, there are some problems with the execution. First, the app was obviously originally released in French, and the English translation needs to be rewritten/retranslated. I promise I’m not just being a grammar nerd here, and I don’t expect the rest of the world to speak English just because I do.

The problem is that a lot of the instructions are so awkwardly worded that they are just plain difficult to understand. Also, the “tasks” page is still in French, and the user interface simply isn’t intuitive enough to make up for the language barrier. If I were a native French speaker and I were rating the French version of the product, I probably would have scored it a little bit higher.

It was also frustrating to enter phone numbers into the system-there’s no indication of what format to use. If you enter the cell phone number like this: 888-888-8888, you get an error message, but all it says is “error.” It doesn’t show you the correct format. It’s no problem now that I know how to do it, but it shouldn’t have taken me several tries to figure it out.

Finally, on the planning page, I think it would probably be helpful to be able to view the schedule for an individual employee instead of viewing everyone’s at the same time, and I didn’t see an option to do that.

That said, I could see how this app would be extremely useful to anyone who has to manage a group of employees working in the field. Just expect a little bit of a learning curve with this product.

What do you think? Would that affect your ability to use this type of service?

Our Rating of Livetask

Tags: Business

Categories:mobile