Horrible

If I were tasked with desiging a UI to confound users, it’s hard to imagine I could do a better job than Harvest. Perhaps it’s OK on the desktop, but laptop support is abyssmal. As an example, if you leave a timer running and open your laptop when it has no internet connection, you’ll be prompted to either remove the idle time or continue, despite the fact that the client can’t do either of those things for you. Either save my selection and sync the event when I’m connected, or don’t prompt me.

Additionally, you can’t manually start or stop a timer when you’re offline, because the server is the only system of record. Even worse, today I was prompted to remove idle time or continue timing. I selected remove idle time, and a minute later the app corrected me, telling me it was idle or something, and reversed my change. At that point, I didn’t recall how much time it was idle for, so I couldn’t even correct it accurately.

Other services like FreshBooks handle offline updates seamlessly. There’s really no excuse for how bad the experience of using Harvest on a laptop is.

chrispix about Harvest