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.
Ahh, but there is something missing here you say…where is the business card view?
We’ve made it so if you hover over a contact name with your mouse, up pops that old familiar business card. We also added to ability to tag and SuperTag from within the business card.
Last but not least, batch actions are still here and we just launched a brand new one…merge! You can now merge together 2 records. Pick the contact to become the main record and we will merge over all comms, location information etc into the new contact.
We tried hard not to take away anything and feel that the overall experience is much better. We hope you agree! As always we appreciate your feedback so let us know what you think.
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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.
One has to assume that other users will start by importing contacts from all over the place, just like I did. So, right off the bat, I noticed that I needed—and therefore assume users needed—a better interface for merging duplicate cards (often you want some info from each copy of the record) and ways to quickly select a bunch of contacts to delete (ones that were in your address book but you know you’ll never need again).
Becoming your own user also gives you a better sense of is what known issues really need to be fixed ASAP. For me, this was our affiliations feature. When I was combing through bug fixes, I knew there were some issues with affiliations, but I kind if shrugged them off, assuming they were not as high of a priority as some display issues. Well, once I started using the app, I found how incredibly useful affiliations are. The bugs really bothered me. So Sean and Riley fixed them.
I’m currently putting together some new mockups for just about the entire Contacts section of the application. A ton of these enhancements and tweaks came from my experience of using the application. I hope to get them into the app soon so that your experience can be as streamlined as I envision it.
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Tags: batchbook, crm, importing contacts, online address book, User Experience, vCard
