Thrive Solo is a brand new promising web app for solo freelancers, that have to manage clients, contacts, projects, time sheets, invoices and that presents interesting statistics implemented in the core pages of the application: the dashboard and the projects page.

Before I start criticizing every aspect of the app I want to give credit to the designers of Solo, they made a great job designing the app, focusing on the most important data and on the general usability.

The home screen and the general design of the app is gorgeous, very minimal and with box/font sizes chosen very accurately.

The first things I noticed is the resolution: it doesn’t fit in the standard 1024 size, although it could fit in it! They can just take out 15 pixel from the left padding and voilà it should fit.

The project page is similar to the home page, with a very nice minimal design that presents the data very clearly. A little note: it would be better to have a button that change the status of the project (from in progress to completed for example) without going inside the edit project popup.

In the invoices it’s not possible to add timer entries to the invoice automatically. Make note that when you make an invoice it doesn’t show the billing address field of the client automatically, but in the email sent invoice it does.

For the time entries, it’s a bit disappointing that you can’t just click on a day and add the hours/minutes, but you have to always choose the start date, the end date, the start time and the end time, it’s a bit too long procedure for a time entry.

Form labels are nice designed, inside the form fields, but the label are a bit too hard to read because the font color is a too much light gray on a white background.

Also a little bad note on the design: the combobox are not styled with css, they really could be improved from the standard browser style.

On the date fields you have to select from a calendar, really done well, and you have to navigate the calendar to the exact date; a nice addition could be to let the user fill the date field with text, which is much faster.

All the input fields where the user add or modify data are on a popup, which isn’t optimal, on my opinion putting the fields on the same page sliding content over and below is more immediate and would increase consistency.

I wanted to critic the Thrive’s work because in my opinion they made a nice step to the right direction, diversifying itself from the competition, and because I really need an app like Thrive Solo.

The price of 10USD a month is good too, but I think they should still improve the application to make it more appetible to the target customers.