At Clever Starfish, we use 88Miles for our time track­ing. Cre­ated by friend and col­league Myles Eftos, 88Miles is a sim­ple web based punch in/punch out sys­tem that lets us keep track of bill­able time.

Recently, Myles rolled out some updates. Know­ing ahead of time that there would be down­time, he added a lit­tle mes­sage to the side­bar for logged in users like so:

What blew me away was the “your local time” bit. 88Miles knows my time­zone, so it’s telling me when the down­time will be in terms that I can grasp straight away. That’s good usabil­ity and good business.

All this reminded me of another appli­ca­tion that we use in our busi­ness — Mail­Build. This is a fan­tas­tic newslet­ter sys­tem that I can’t rave enough about — it really has every pos­si­ble base cov­ered. Mail­Build and it’s older sib­ling Cam­paign Mon­i­tor (sim­i­lar ser­vice, slightly dif­fer­ent mar­ket) are made by a Syd­ney com­pany, Freshview. On their con­tact page, they have the fol­low­ing information:

So if you hap­pen to be in another coun­try — and I dare say a large pro­por­tion of their cus­tomer base is in the United States — you know not only what their busi­ness hours are, but what the cur­rent time is in their time­zone, so you have some idea of what kind of response to expect to sup­port requests, etc. For a service-based oper­a­tion, that’s good busi­ness. I wish some US-based providers that we use would realise that the world doesn’t revolve around their hours.