Suggestions

Hi
I have been using oDesk for a month or so now , it has been a good experience so far but i have a few suggestions:

1 : There needs to be a better way for the Buyer and Provider to discuss the project BEFORE the actual job application is sent. The message board is hardly used and some Buyers provide very little info , so you end up either bypassing something good or end up wasting your time applying for something you arent interested in. I would suggest a AJAX messengerer in here , which connects the 2 together if both are logged into oDesk.

2 : The My oDesk interface has plenty of options , some repetitive and sub sub-classing something else , i took me a month to get around to figuring the whole thing out , i suggest that the navigation needs to be improved plenty.Its hard to figure out/remember the difference between time analyze , work analyze and alot of links like that. Why not just have one area with Work History , where you can filter of various parameters, like by job , by buyer , by date range etc.

3 : on My oDesk , i would like to see a graphed chart of my activity during the week/month. Which shows how much have i worked at a glance , maybe a multi-bar chart , dividing the bar into projects?

4 : Not sure if i truely understand the purpose of username@odesk.com email, what does it do really? unless there is a mail box dedicated for the oDesk Communication. Seems to add to the confusion, secondly , when you reply from your own email address, that can get filtered , as some maybe looking for the email from provider@odesk.com ? But honestly i think you are just wasting some precious CPU cycles on that email forwarding.

5 : Past closed projects should be added automatically to my portfolio.

6 : The search should be weighted , for instance a feedback of 5 on a project of 5 hours , shouldnt be equal to a feedback of 5 on a 100 hours job.

7 : There should be an option to devise separate rates for separate skills . Like i can do both application and web development , but that doesnt mean , i charge the same per hour rate for both. So if someone is searching for an expert on VB.NET , he would see my web rate and think of me a junior level guy OR even go and hire me on that rate. While a PHP buyer may find me VB.NET really high and may not want to even look at my profile any more.

8 :  There should be a 'Request Feedback' link and reminder to both parties , the more feedback means , more filtered results for buyers and more accurate hiring.

 
9 : To make it easier for people to understand , the timezone differences , it would probably be a good idea to show the actual time in the users region. And there should be an oDesk official Site time in the header somewhere.

 
10 :  oDesk Team software has one annoying bit , if i want to just stop working  , i have to click disconnect , otherwise if i click suspend , it would again log me into the same buyer. There should be a way to 'Stop' working , so that i dont have to disconnect and in result , put in password once again when i want to start working on something different.

11 : Also , the community user profile , should link back to oDesk profile , so that people can know who the person is really. 

 I think thats plenty for now

Regards
Sab

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