We’re pleased to announce a major overhaul of our contacts browse page. While we never thought the previous incarnation was bad, we did feel it could be better. We finally carved out some time and through a major team effort, were able to launch the redesigned browse contacts page today.
Here’s a peek at the new page:
Of special interest is that there’s now a live search option on the top left, which makes it really easy to narrow down to a single contact record. This is my favorite part of the redesign; I usually know exactly who I’m looking for and live search will pull up that record as soon as I start typing.
We also added some more filters to allow you to view your contacts in different ways. You can filter by Individuals, Companies, Most Active. You can further refine that by choosing a tag to filter by. We kept the alphabetical search option as well. All these options work together to help you refine your contact list. And the best part though is these search filters are persistent. Each time you come back to the browse page, it will remember your search preferences and display your contacts based on those options. So if you only ever want to see individuals, select that preference. Every time you come back to browse you will only see individuals in your search results.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, online address book
As soon as I joined BatchBlue in May, I was thrown into the fire—we had a beta to get out, after all. There were lots of bugs to be fixed, display issues to be resolved, cranky browsers to accommodate, and architectures to learn. A lot of things initially impressed me about BatchBook, but it seemed like all I was doing was fixing issues. It becomes easy to lose a sense of the whole when you’re arm wrestling with tiny pieces of code day after day.
Then, a wonderful thing (on so many levels) happened—I took a couple weeks off to welcome our second child. For two weeks, I didn’t fix any bugs… I fixed makeshift dinners. I didn’t clean up code… I cleaned up belly button regions. I didn’t change class names, I changed diapers. Yet, I still used BatchBook. But I finally used it as a real live user.
When you become a user, you expand your view of the app beyond just functionality to include the entire user experience. Sure, things work… and kudos to Sean and Riley on getting that foundation in place. Now is the time for Michelle and I to make sure things feel right.
I started off by importing my contacts from my Mac OS X Address Book, my GMail account, and my LinkedIn account. The imports (via vCard) were flawless, which is wonderful. What I noticed right away is that we really need to streamline the process for consolidating the contacts library after this first batch of imports.
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Tags: batchbook, crm, importing contacts, online address book, User Experience, vCard
