Sometimes the best solutions are really the most simple.
A couple weeks ago, there was a great forum discussion on how to assign follow up tasks immediately after logging communications. This wasn’t just a back-and-forth, this was a full fledged discussion with forum users Bradley, Kenny, HansD, and Stewart taking part.
We have always had the ability to log a communication and to create a To-Do that was assigned to a user and linked back to a communication. But the forum users were looking for a way to “remind” the other users on their account to create a To-Do after logging a communication, if one was necessary. Many approaches were discussed, but the following messages made it clear what we needed to do:
From Bradley:
From a business-process stand point, logging a communication and generating the resulting task are a single action. Yes, you could log the communication, then open it, then start a to-do action. However, you’ve now undertaken three actions as opposed to one, any one of which a staff person could forget or be interrupted before completing.
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Tags: communications management, Customer Service, forums, halloween, microformats, User Experience
As BatchBlue’s User Experience Designer, a big part of my job is to hide BatchBook’s technologies from users that don’t want to deal with them. My main goal is to make sure users can do what they need to do as efficiently and painlessly as possible.
For this reason, it takes a pretty compelling bit of technology for me to bring it into BatchBook and expose it to our users. Today, I wanted to share one of those technologies with you. Consider this a warning that this post can get a bit techy, but if you follow me you’ll see that it’s really not that bad and can actually be quite useful.
About Microformats
When I first heard of a technology called Microformats, my initial thought was “oh geez, now what?” This was at a time that I was already trying to learn about things like AJAX, Javascript libraries, and browser quirks in CSS development. Microformats sounded like just another thing to add to the list.
But microformats are different. They’re simple. And while the potential usefulness for them is just being uncovered, there is already an immediate benefit. One of the key microformats, hCard, is all about contact information. So, of course, that one is huge for BatchBook.
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Tags: batchbook, microformats, User Experience
With the launch of the Apple iPhone merely a few days away, Apple’s legion of loyal developers entered the week still anxiously awaiting word on how they are supposed to develop applications for the thing. The answer, most assumed, would come this week at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC07) this week. The timing was frighteningly close to the iPhone’s launch, but better late than never.
Well, they got their answer. And many didn’t like it. As Michael Calore of Wired put it:
Suddenly, a sound that’s rarely ever heard in a Jobs keynote welled up in the giant conference hall. Crickets.
Apple’s self-proclaimed “sweet” solution is an interesting one. They essentially told the developers to “make web apps.” The iPhone runs a full version of Apple’s Safari web browser. (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax are all fully supported, so essentially if a web app uses web standards, it will work on the iPhone.
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Tags: batchbook, iphone, microformats, mobile browser, mobile web, mobility
