BIG Changes at Echo Mobile
This holiday season, Echo Mobile will deliver an exciting gift to users. When organizations log into their Echo platform accounts from 2 January 2019, they’ll find a totally revamped Echo platform interface!
This is NOT a fundamental change to what the Echo platform does. Nor is it a change to the platform’s features, which remain the same.
This new look simply gives Echo platform users a cleaner, more intuitive experience that provides instant and continuous access to multiple powerful features. Surveys, contacts, fields, and analytics will be easier to discover and use, ensuring that organizations get maximum value from the Echo platform.
Why the changes?
Well, there are a lot of reasons!
1. Echo Mobile has a new mission
In 2012, Echo Mobile emerged from Kenya’s startup community to help social organizations communicate via SMS. We’ve since evolved into a leading enterprise technology provider, serving the public, private, and social sectors alike. East Africa’s most exciting businesses and institutions now come to Echo Mobile for much more than just communication.
To keep pace with this evolution and guide us into the future, we’ve updated our mission, vision, and values.
Echo Mobile’s official daily mission is to:
This mission is part of our broader company vision of:
Our work to achieve this mission and vision is guided by our core beliefs, that:
2. Echo Mobile has a new approach
Our values will now inform how we market our product, but they’ve already changed how we design and build it. After a concerted effort in 2018 to better engage, listen to, and understand our users, we realized the Echo platform’s design needed to change.
Our team — from engineers to administrators — has been out of the office and in the field throughout 2018. This user-centered design research involved over a dozen user interviews and prototyping sessions.
We’ve learned so much about the users’ work and goals, as well as what they love about the platform, what frustrates them, and what more they need. We’re grateful for those insights and proud to unveil some of the results:
- The most common need was for more analytics to help users understand data they gather on the platform. This resulted in a suite of new analysis features, that have been deployed throughout 2018, from survey performance to NPS gauges and dashboards.
- The most common frustrations stemmed from navigation and discovery — moving between and finding new features. These issues started on the home page. It wasn’t clear which features were available or how to find them, especially for new users. So we started fresh!
3. Echo Mobile has rebranded
To communicate our newly defined mission, vision, and values, Echo Mobile needed to upgrade its brand. Above, you saw a quick teaser of what the rebrand will looks like. Here’s another!
Starting in January 2019, you’ll find these logos, colors, and other elements of the new brand implemented on all of our public material. This includes a totally new public website and login page, new marketing material, and across the newly designed platform!
What do the changes mean for users?
The Echo platform’s new look streamlines how you access Echo’s most important and powerful features:
- There is a new home page — the first thing you see after you log in to the Echo platform or click on the platform’s Echo Mobile logo or “Home” button.
- There is a new ever-present left-hand menu. Wherever you are on the platform, you can now get where you need to be next with a single click!
- There is a cleaner, more modern look that reflects our rebrand.
On the home page, we’ve made the activity summary simple and straightforward, though you can still switch out today’s activity summary for an analysis dashboard.
And we’ve brought critical features to the forefront with the left-hand menu (dark blue) and pop-out sub-menus (light blue). These are simple, visual menus fixed to the left side of your screen — ready to take you straight to your essential tools from wherever you are.
The quick access buttons on the home page take you to the platform’s most important features:
Each button brings up similarly simple and visual dialog boxes that explain what features are available
What’s next?
The Echo Mobile team has spent the last two months using the new platform design internally, making final tweaks and hunting for bugs so that it is ready for users on January 2nd, 2019. While we anticipate an easy transition, we know that all software redesigns, no matter how much of an upgrade, can require some initial learning and frustration.
Starting in January, users will also find a revamped Knowledge Base to help learn the new platform interface. And of course, as always, our Support team stands ready to answer any of your “how-to” questions via platform chat, email, and phone!
In January and February, Echo platform users will also be able to choose between using either the old Echo platform interface or the new and improved design. Account Admins will also be able to temporarily turn off the new design for their entire organization.
BUT, as of March 4, 2019, the old Echo platform interface will be removed and all Echo platform users will be switched to the new look.
In the meantime, we’re already on to the next set of upgrades! Look out for major 2019 improvements to our APIs and the Survey Builder, and for new opportunities with messengers such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp!
