omelett.es journalThe journal of team omelett.es //

Visual cues is the fancy name for a new feature we have just added to Tactile CRM to allow users to upload logos/pictures against people and organisations within the system.

We’ve been wanting to add this for some time and have been playing around with a few different ways of doing it – the reason is simple, research shows that scanning a list/series of images is a far quicker way of finding information and that the brain is better at processing these visual clues.

As Tactile CRM is designed to make your day to day business life easier to manage we thought this would be a great way to help save some time.

The process is easy. Simple view an organisation or person, click on the icon to the left of their name and an upload box will appear:

The image will be automatically resized and stored against them (this works the same for logos and pictures against organisations and people). The images will then be displayed when you view them on the overview pages:

and when you view each item:

We hope you find this new feature useful – it’s part of some larger UI updates we have been doing – and has been lead by user feedback and suggestions, so if you want to see something in Tactile CRM, just share your ideas on our feedback forum.

Our goal is to make Tactile CRM the best easy to use web based crm system for small businesses. As part of this drive we recently made email support available for free to all users (not just paying customers), now we’ve made it easy to submit a support request directly when using Tactile CRM:

Got a question or need help with Tactile CRM? Click the Support link (top right) and a window will open within the sytem (prefilled with your email address so we can get back to you). All you need to do is tell us what’s up and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

We hope this makes life easier for people, and encourages people to ask us questions to get the most from Tactile CRM.

We know how nice it is to have your IT systems match your corporate colours and branding so our team at Tactile CRM have been working hard to add some great features which we released this week – Themes & Logos.

Admin users can now select one of six specially created colour themes which will appear for all users.

Another feature we are often asked about is the ability to upload logos for organisations, well now you can! When viewing an organisation, a box will appear allowing you to upload a logo. If you upload a logo for your own company, it will appear on everyone’s dashboard.

We love getting feedback from our users and it influences the roadmap for Tactile CRM, if you have any ideas, feedback or suggestions do get in touch!

We use Campaign Monitor to send out our ‘monthly’ Tactile CRM newsletter. After reading a recent article on their blog about how they redesigned their newsletter I thought I’d apply some of the principles to ours and see what a difference it made.

The changes made a massive effect (in a good way). Using their ideas/suggestions we doubled the click through rate on our emails (consequently we saw a big spike in traffic to the website/blog) and increased our open rate by 50%.

All of this took about half an hour – we already had the content, and used the campaign monitor templates with a few tweaks of our own. Now that we know it works we’ll spend a bit more time with our own design and look and feel but all in all it was time well spent.

The main changes we made were:

• Including a ‘table of contents’ in the header so people can jump straight to content and see if it interested them
• Short snippets for each story inviting them to click through to the blog/website where relevant
• More like a newsletter than an email

This last point is quite important. If you look at the new newsletter below, it looks more like a newsletter than an email with a lot of text (like the original) – I still wanted to include a personal greeting at the top but I think the blend works well and the results speak for themsleves.

New Newsletter

Old Newsletter

If you’ve visited the Tactile CRM website recently (and it wasn’t your first visit), you will have noticed that it looked a little different! We’ve taken the opportunity to give it a refresh alongside the new version of Tactile CRM that we have just released.

The old site was looking tired and it didn’t reflect what Tactile CRM could do. We’ve got a load of new testimonials (drop me an email to jake [at] tactilecrm dot com if you are interested in being included), new video content and hopefully an all round better site.

That’s not the end though, we’re going to be making some tweaks and changes over the coming months using what is known as A/B split testing (we try making small changes, record the difference in signups and make a decision based on that – if you want a really dull in-depth explanation, check out wikipedia) to see how we can increase the sign up and conversion rates to make sure even more people benefit from Tactile CRM.

As always, your comments thoughts, feedback and suggestions are gratefully received.

The new version of Tactile CRM has a brand new interface – you can see some examples of it and this is what the new version looks like:

What I wanted to take a look at was some of the new UI features we have added (above tidying it up and making it look prettier) that add new functionality.

Quick Add

One of the key new features is the ‘Quick Add’ tab that allows you to quickly add a new item from any page within Tactile CRM

We had a lot of feedback from users that if you were working on something (such as adding a note or viewing a person), then needed to add something, you had to use ‘two mouse clicks’ to get to the add screen.

This is quite a common usage pattern within Tactile CRM so we’ve added a new tab that uses some nifty javascript to display the options when you move your mouse over it.

Now all you need is one click and you are there.

Custom Views

We’ve added the ability to customise your view of data (on the dashboard for example) and choose to restrict how you view your data. The screen shot below shows how you can easily choose which organisations you want to see:

We decided showing this on the screen the whole time was a pain and took up valuable screen real-estate. We’ve got over that by showing the current view and showing you the options when you move your mouse over it.

Pop Up Lightboxes

We’ve got some cool new integrations with other products – FreshBooks is there already, Campaign Monitor is in testing along with Hosted VOIP/Telephony integration. As a result we have the situation where it is useful to be able to send/receive data to those other systems.

We’ve started using lightboxes to display these forms to reduce page loads and allow you to work within the system in a more flowing/natural way.

These are just a few of the more obvious additions and many have been lead by user suggestions. We take all the feedback we receive seriously so check out feedback forums if you want to influence Tactile CRM!

We’re currently finalising and testing the new/updated interface for Tactile CRM – we’ll be releasing it in the new few weeks along with some other new features we’re sure you’ll love.

One of the many things we’ve worked on is how tasks are displayed on the dashboard and we thought we’d give you the first in a series of ’sneak peeks’ at the new Tactile CRM.

The New

First up, we’ve lost the headings for “Overdue” and “Due Today” tasks – these are now combined and use a visual clue to distinguish them (red and orange backgrounds).

This makes identifying your key tasks much easier and they can easily be scanned in one go without being broken by unnecessary headings.

We’ve also tweaked “Upcoming” and “Later” to “What’s New?” and “Marked as Later”.

The Old

Compare this with the current version and even with the increase in ‘white space’ the new panel takes up less space, presents more information more easily and should make for an even more useful dashboard in Tactile CRM:

Keep your eyes peeled for more information, and check out the new Tactile CRM RSS feed to keep up to date with what’s going on.

I’ve been researching into new designs and features for the Tactile CRM website and came across The Typographic Desktop Reference website:

Straight away the site gets to the point and shows you what the product is all about – I’m seriously considering purchasing the book – but also, it has a great way to show pages within the book when you click on them:

These ‘popups’ are commonly know as ‘modal dialogs’ or ‘lightboxes’ and are a great way to display information and gain user input without cluttering the page and requiring page reloads.