SuperTags: Simple yet powerful contact customization
- Posted March 6th, 2008
- Filed under: Product Updates, Technology, User Experience, Using BatchBook
I haven’t written a product update in a few weeks and wanted to let you know about a major piece of work we recently released.
BatchBook allows for powerful customization of your contact data. Our back-end systems will support an impressive amount of customization, but the trick has been to provide it to our users in a logical, easy-to-use way.
Our first attempt at this was Custom Fields. You could create and group custom fields together and then apply those fields to a record. An example would be a custom field set for clients of real estate agents with fields like “Approved for Loan” and “Spending Budget”. When you entered a new contact you could apply this field set to a client and fill out the information for the client fields.
This worked well, but we found it was too many clicks to apply the fields to a record and fill them out User testing revealed that the whole custom fields idea, while powerful, was hidden and thus not getting used very much. It was also difficult for people to grasp conceptually that they needed to create a Custom Field set, the go back in and apply it to their contacts.
A few months ago, we had a brainstorming session around customization. The result was SuperTags. Since tagging records is the best way to organize contacts in BatchBook, we thought why not extend this idea and let tags manage custom fields sets as well?
Now when you create a tag in BatchBook, you have the option to upgrade it to a SuperTag. This allows you to associate a custom field set directly to that tag. When you SuperTag a new contact, you’re immediately prompted to fill out the custom fields associated with the SuperTag, which allows you to capture the same information about all your contacts.
You can read more details in our FAQs and on our website, and even watch a short video of SuperTagging in action.
Please let us know what you think. We’re very excited about this change and look forward to refining this idea even more in upcoming months.
