BatchBook Blog
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It has been quite some time since I wrote for the “Using BatchBook” category, and I wanted to share some of my personal BatchBook usage tips.
To-Dos: Complete vs. Delete
You may have noticed that we have a “Done” checkbox as well as a “Delete” button with every task on your To-Do List. Why?
We used to have tasks disappear immediately when you hit the “Done” checkbox. There was a very “instant gratification” feel to it. But at the end of the day, I found myself thinking, “Hey wait—what did I actually get done today?”
Now during the day, I check items as done—and they are not removed from the list. At the start of the next day, I delete all the finished tasks and start the same process over again.
Notes to Self
Often during the day, you just need to write something down. Of course, being a web kid, I don’t grab a pen. I have to do it digitally. What I found myself doing was opening up a text editor, typing my note, saving it some random place, and then forgetting about it. I figured there had to be a better way. I’m already using BatchBook pretty much all day every day, so why not just do it there? Enter Communications.
From my own contact detail, I choose the “log new communication” button and record a comm as if I was having a chat with someone else—though it is really a chat with myself (no, that’s not weird). Then I save my communication with a “note-to-self” tag. This way I can pull them all up at once. You can delete your notes-to-self as you’re finished with them, or you can keep an archive of all the times you felt the need to talk to yourself. Your shrink will appreciate the digital paper trail.
And of course: SuperTags
The #1 way to customize BatchBook for your own data needs and workflow preferences is SuperTags. Not only can you tag your contacts however you’d like to organize them, but you can also add extra fields every time that tag is used.
Michelle already wrote about how she and I used SuperTags to track information about people we met this year at South By Southwest. We were able to track where we met each person, whether we needed to follow up, and what the action item was. Additionally, we could have tracked anything else our hearts desired—you can create text fields, multiple choice options, and more.
Another example of SuperTagging use is how I track birthdays in my personal account. Chances are, if I actually know someone’s birthday, they are a family member. So, I have a “family” tag that I turned into a SuperTag. I added a “Birthday” date field to it so now I can track birthdays for all family members, view and edit all birthdays in the same place, and generate a report of just family members’ birthdays.
We’ve heard from a few users about unique ways they are using SuperTags. One online publisher is using SuperTags to track information about advertisers and contributing writers. A recent email from a customer told us how he is using SuperTags to track feedback from courses he teaches. Many people have noticed SuperTags are a great way to track lead generation—by only keeping tabs on the information you need.
Do you have any BatchBook and SuperTagging tips you’d like to share?
Tags: batchbook, contact management, User Experience
This round of changes includes a lot of suggestions from our beta users, more so than any other code push we have done so far:
- To-Dos now support entering natural language date entry. What is this you say? Well, it’s possibly my favorite feature right now in BatchBook. Now instead of having to use the calendar pop-up to enter dates, you can just enter something like ‘next wednesday’ in the text field and it figures out the date for you. This is really useful for entering terms like ‘tomorrow’, ‘today’ , ‘next month’ etc. It will also support dates like “1/31″ and will just default to the current year. Give it a try; it’s so fun it makes you wish you had more To-Dos to enter.
- Another change is that overdue To-Dos are now styled in red with an exclamation point in front of them. This makes it much easier to quickly scan the page and see what tasks are in need of attention.
- For Contacts, we’ve removed the requirement of needing a last name for an individual contact. Sometimes you just do not have a persons last name, which shouldn’t prevent you from getting the contact in BatchBook. Editor’s note: like if you know Madonna! Or Cher!
- We also made a change to the Contact detail page that makes it much easier to log location information. You’ll now see a blank form ready to fill out. This is just the start of a major revamp to this page we have in the works. Stay tuned…
- The Login page now has a “Remember me” checkbox which will keep you logged into BatchBook for two weeks. This is really nice for accessing BatchBook on mobile devices so that you can stay logged into the app without having to re-enter your email and password everyday.
There have also been a bunch of little UI tweaks here which should make for a better experience all around, especially in IE7.
It’s very cool to be getting such great feedback from our users, so keep sending it in.
Tags: Customer Service, usability, 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.
You may be familiar with vCard, the standard format that many address programs like Outlook and Address Book uses to import, store, and export contact information. hCard is an HTML version of vCard. Many sites offer links to vCards so users can download contact information and add it to Outlook or another address application. But offering a vCard in addition to your site’s content means you not only have to maintain your web site’s content but also the information stored in all those vCards. With hCard, you can have the same information available in both formats.
Microformats and BatchBook
It may be best to simply show you how this can directly help you when using BatchBook. One of the best tools for reaping the rewards of microformats is a Firefox extension called Operator, written by Michael Kaply of IBM.
Let’s pretend you’re scoping out a hot new small business. In their press section, you find contact information for their executives. Since you’d like to speak with this company, you start the tedious process of copying and pasting the information to your address book.
But there’s a better way.
This company marked up their contact information using the hCard format. If you’re using the Operator toolbar, this is what you’d see:
Operator is telling you that you can download the contact information for any or all of the executives with just one click. I think each one of them is super cool, so let’s grab all three.
Operator sent them right to my Address Book application. Of course, you can also add them to Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other application that supports the vCard format.
Let’s take the next step and import them into BatchBook:
Like magic, you just went from a plain old HTML page to BatchBook with a couple clicks. Here’s how the information looks in BatchBook.
And, of course, to keep the contact-sharing-goodness flowing full-circle, our Browse Contacts page is marked up in hCard. So, you can export yourself from BatchBook and send your sister your vCard so she never has to ask for your cell phone number or zip code again.
Though the example above shows only name, title, company, and email address, hCard can also be used for mailing and web addresses as well as phone, fax, and cell numbers.
Behind the Curtain
What kind of technology goes into making this possible? It is literally the difference between this:
<h2>Sean Ransom</h2>
and
<h2 class="fn">Sean Ransom</h2>
Simply adding class names around each type of data (zip-code, street-address, org, etc.) allows software (like Operator) to detect the information. The code is invisible to the user, but the benefits are not.
Our Own Use Case
Microformats came in ridiculously handy for BatchBlue recently. When we launched BatchBook at the DEMOfall07 conference, we provided a service for conference attendees that pre-populated their new BatchBook accounts with demonstrators from the past five DEMO conferences, their company’s executives, conference staff, and press. The DEMO site has a page for each presenter that contains all of this contact information.
It would have been a dream come true if these pages were marked up with hCard, but they weren’t. So, using another Firefox extension (called Greasemonkey) and Riley’s scripting skills, we were able to make our local versions of Firefox add microformats where needed on each page. We were then able to reap the rewards, exporting the information and uploading it into BatchBook. There’s nothing quite like NOT having to copy and paste hundreds of mailing addresses into the appropriate fields. We then offered the code changes to the DEMO team so everyone can benefit from this.
Beyond hCard
hCard isn’t the only microformat. There are others that are heavily used, such as hCalendar (the HTML version of the ICAL calendaring format). There are other “elemental” microformats that may not seem very powerful on their own, but when combined with other microformats and applications can do amazing things. Some of these, like XFN (eXtended Friend Network), play a big part in Brian Oberkirch’s writings about portable social networks.
But for small business owners, it is all about addressing pain points. Repetitive tasks such as copying and pasting contact information are obvious pain points that can be addressed with simple technologies such as microformats. Sometimes it seems as though you hear about new technology every day. Here’s one that can actually provide an immediate benefit.
Tags: batchbook, microformats, User Experience
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.
Tags: batchbook, crm, importing contacts, online address book, User Experience, vCard
Software and its users have entered an age of higher expectations. Although business software is hardly leading the charge, it’s starting to catch up.
Once upon a time, business software was business software. Nobody got too excited about it, if by “excited” we understand something positive. Except, of course, for the people whose business it was to sell the software and a few pointy-haired analysts who knew what to do with the numbers it was increasingly possible to wrangle.
As more companies realized the competitive advantages of computerizing aspects of their day-to-day workflow, the market for business software grew exponentially. Competition was fierce for this new market. Alongside aggressive sales, the makers of business software relied on vendor lock-in to keep their customers buying their products and related upgrades whether the customers wanted to or not.
Nobody was too happy with this arrangement, if by “nobody” we understand anybody besides the makers of business software. Those in charge of buying decisions had to negotiate upgrades and additional licenses with effective monopolies. And those on the user end too often found themselves wrestling with obtuse interfaces, inscrutable user manuals and cryptic error messages.
Then, the Internet happened. While it didn’t change the old, bad ways of business software all at once, it caused people to understand computers and their use in a new light.
Between the advent of email, holding virtual garage sales on Ebay, and viewing homes on local real estate web sites, people who previously thought of computers as an obligation, began to think of them as an opportunity. They began to ask what computers could do for them in their work and daily lives.
Another, less obvious change came about because the Internet was predicated on the concept of “open standards”. There wasn’t a separate Internet for Microsoft users, Macintosh users, and scraggly-bearded Unix wizards. Software could be designed to work together across platforms. When it did, it became far more useful to everybody. If it made sense to browse the World Wide Web via Netscape, people did so. If they liked Internet Explorer, they could use that instead. People came to expect choices.
And the Web itself became a domain of choice. Some web sites were weak in content, ugly, unusable. Others, like Amazon.com, offered something not available hitherto and worked assiduously to reduce the amount of “friction” in a user’s experience. The distance between one web site and its competitors was never any greater than a stroke of a mouse. Customer acclaim became such a decisive factor that some fledgling ventures neglected fundamentals in its pursuit.
When software met the Internet, the relationship between the makers of software and its users was reconfigured — to the users’ benefit. My blog entries will examine this convergence, and consider how innovations like Open Source, social software, and the increasing attention to user experience are shaping the way businesses of all sizes are using technology to accomplish their goals.
Tags: business, open source, User Experience
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