From Monday, when you log in to the system, you may notice some changes in the user interface. It’s had a bit of a makeover to make it easier to use, more modern and make navigating around much quicker.
Here’s a quick rundown of the main updates, with a couple of annotated screenshots.
Here’s a tile which has been opened – ‘Ingredients’.
Firstly, there’s a toolbar at the top of the screen, which remains visible wherever you are in the system. It will stay there as you scroll up and down through data, so will always be easily accessible.
At the top left, are three navigation options
- The agileChilli logo will always take you to the homepage, wherever you are
- The back arrow to the right of it, will take you back one step to the previous screen you were in (finally taking you back to the homepage)
- The history icon (the clock) next to that is a quick way of navigating anywhere else in the system without needing to go back to the homepage. People testing the system have loved this, it’s shown in more detail below
The menus to the right are specific to the tile that’s open. The system can cope with any number. On a typical laptop, there’s space for eight to ten (larger screens may see more) to be seen initially. If there are more than that, the toolbar will automatically expand to show them when you hover over the area.
Near the top right is an actions panel, with actions relevant to the view or record on screen. In a view, the buttons allow you to
- show and add charts
- export to spreadsheet, or share a link to the view with other users (this is a new feature)
- add a new record
The filtering button shows or hides the filter boxes. The current state will stay when you switch between tiles, so you won’t have to keep clicking it if you do a lot of filtering. Hiding the filter boxes is also a quick way of clearing all filters applied to the view.
In general, there’s more space given over to content – so you can see more rows and columns on screen at once.
Finally, Windows users will find a welcome change – you can now scroll quickly right and left using scrollbars, rather than using the old buttons.
History
Here’s a look at the history feature mentioned earlier.
When you click the history icon, a large, searchable menu appears.
At the top is a list of the recently opened records, which you can navigate to quickly.
Below that are the recently opened views. Again, you can click on them to jump directly back to them.
The search box lets you look at not just recently opened views and records, but any tile or view in the system. For example, if you want to look at an allergens report for your ingredients, you can now type ‘allergens’ into the search, rather than navigating to the homepage, opening the tile which contains the view (which you may not be sure of) and then selecting the right view.
That’s a quick run-down – everything should be reasonably intuitive but it is different to before, so we thought you’d appreciate this heads up.
There are plenty more improvements coming down the line following this visual refresh, we have some exciting things in the roadmap which should really shake things up, particularly making building apps easier. We look forward to launching those.
In the meantime, please let us know what you think when you use your system the next time. Feedback is really useful and we will always try to react quickly to any good suggestions.