We’ve released an update to the dashboard today which we hope will help make it even easier to see what’s been going on in Tactile CRM with your clients and contacts – now when you view your dashboard we group all the activities etc. together under headings such as ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Last Week’ and ‘Over a Week Ago’.

We’ve also updated the way emails are displayed (after feedback from users) so that attachments are displayed against the email instead of lumped together with all the files attached to a person, or organisation.

We hope you find this new feature useful. As always, please do let us know what you’d like to see in Tactile CRM and we’ll do our best to accommodate it.

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.

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!

I’m currently putting together an introductory video for Tactile CRM to go on the new website – in advance of that I thought some screenshots may be of some interest.

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.

It’s been a bit quite today on the interesting link front I’m afraid. Most of today has been looking at updates for the new Tactile CRM website and the links below reflect mainly UI and user testing stuff I have been looking at.

• 404 Error Pages
• The $300 Million Button

As always, we’d love to hear ideas and suggestions from you – just drop us an email to journal [at] omelett.es and we’ll take a look.