Lots of people have been UX (user experience) testing agileBase recently and given us lots of valuable ideas. Despite quite a few staff holidays recently, we’ve managed to incorporate a lot of their suggestions into the product and can release them to everyone today! 28 improvements have been made since last month’s release. Many are ‘behind the scenes’ but here are some of the visible highlights.
Notification ‘badges’
Comments and notifications are one of the most heavily used features of the platform. If you mention a particular person in a comment, that person gets a ‘direct message’ that appears at the top of their homepage – they can then easily reply to it if they want to.
With this release, not only will the message appear on the homepage, but if the user isn’t on the homepage at the time, a ‘notification badge’ with a count of messages will appear at the top right of the screen, allowing quick access to direct messages. This helps in the case where the user may not visit the homepage very often, but remains in one tile or app for long periods of time.
Thanks to Lewis Pies for suggesting that improvement.
New & improved user interface controls
Date picker
Modern browsers include their own date pickers, so we now take advantage of that to provide a better experience. Google Chrome’s version is pictured. Dates are quicker to enter, either with the keyboard or mouse and the layout’s more compact.
Older browsers such as Internet Explorer will retain the old-style picker.
Adding items to drop-downs
Similarly, the old method of adding a new item to a dropdown list confused some testers – this UI has been improved, using a popup prompt.
Less ‘jumping’
When navigating between different parts of the screen, the system now smoothly scrolls, so the user always knows where they are.
Easier to see chaser emails
As you may know our ‘chaser’ facility can be set up to automatically email customers or suppliers when their input is needed e.g. if they need to supply a document to you. The visualisation of these messages is now easier to look at, for example repetitions of the same message are reduced.
Administrator features
On the admin side, cloning views is now a lot more reliable, working with particularly complex views as well as basic ones.
Some people had an issue using the facility to download a spreadsheet of all recent changes. That’s now fixed and should work for everyone.
Source: Agilebase