The SmartSuite Magic : July Updates
What and how we enhanced during July.
Hey folks,
starting from now, I’ll be sharing with you the story of our design update processes at SmartSuite.
Customer feedback, demos, competitors research and interaction with clients is the heart of SmartSuite. We are perfectly aware that in order to build a world class product we need to build this around our customers — to listen carefully and understand how they are using SmartSuite, which parts they find problematic, how easy it is for them to sort things out and what are their recommendations.
🚨 We never release a single pixel update without first verifying with our test groups, partners and of course — internally. But it’s a whole another story once something goes live, this is when the actual feedback starts raining.
So if you are a User Interface and/or User Experience designer (or you just love design) you might find some of those updates really interesting — you will be able to see things from the user perspective and notice things you’ve never acknowledged before. I have about 20 years of experience and users never stop amazing me, things that are obvious for me are hard to find for them and vice versa.
As you know, a UI design is never finished — it’s a constantly evolving art that seeks for perfection. And since that’s what we also do at SmartSuite, here are some of the things we improved in July ’22. Enjoy 🎉 (btw I’ll leave the biggest and most important update for the end, so make sure you read it all … 😏)
NOTE : Some of the updates listed below might still not be live but they are definitely in the queue. You know, priorities ….
New VIEWS panel
That’s something we were struggling with for quite some time.
In the old (still current) design we used to have a dropdown menu that now we’re changing to a sliding panel.
The main issue we were facing is that it was hard to people to realise that the report name (the thing saying “Customer Installations” above) is a clickable element. See how we had it :
As it appeared, no matter what we did — placing an arrow in color, highlighting the whole view name, underlining it — it never got that clear to the user that it’s clickable. We were watching how people use our product and it was quite often to see them wondering around and not realising that this is a core element.
So we decided to make it as clear as possible — put a button that says “VIEWS” .
Conclusion : Sometimes people just need to see it in a written form :) Especially in such busy interfaces you should think twice when trying to hide certain functionality behind an icon, no matter how obvious it seems to you.
Automations : Change trigger/action
Now this is literally the same issue as the previous one. People were struggling to understand that they can click on the arrow next to the trigger/action name and open a dropdown with options to pick.
In the following image you can see what we used to have and what we have now. This little button replacing the dropdown arrow mage huge usability difference — nobody is missing it now. So again — when you can and if it’s important — say it with words 📝
Linked Records nesting
In SmartSuite you can go in the rabbit whole by keep clicking on linked records, linked records, linked records. Basically a linked record is the ability to reference one record in another record. With no limitation — rabbit whole.
Currently what we are doing is just to display the linked record modals one over each other (imagine opening a window on your mac/windows, then another one over it, and another one over it), which works but only if you open 1–2 over each other.
So what we did here is that we enhanced the navigation pattern, and if you open a linked record we immediately place a breadcrumns-map-like navigation on the top left of your edit record modal.
Clicking on the dropdown arrow opens a dropdown that shows in a tree-like layout how you got to the current record.
This example is more of a functionality enhancement than it is a usability enhancement, but it just looks really nice, it also gives you a better idea about where you currently at and I just decided to share it with you :)
New Homepage (Workspace) !!!
This is probably the biggest visual updates we’ve done in the past year. As a lead designer @ SmartSuite I can’t tell you how happy I was to finally see this live.
The previous one was bad. We can’t hide it and we shouldn’t, the design should be open and honest, there’s no room for bad feelings in our profession.
Just see it…
We were perfectly aware that we need to do tons of things here but because of more important functionalities that we had to deliver to our clients we kept postponing it until it was impossible to postpone further.
People were trilled. The new homepage was a huge hit. It wasn’t only visual restyling, we introduced new features. All those were requested by users :
- Onboarding-related items (Startguide, videos, etc.) — people were expecting troubles when they start using our app
- Resources sidebar — we needed to make people aware of our webinars, blog posts, academy, community, etc.
- Upcoming webinars listing
- Improved way for adding a new solution — we used to have the “Add new solution” button being the last element in the solution listing. This was causing troubles with people who have dozens of those so we made it to be the first tile
- Shortcut for inviting collaborators — some people were struggling how to invite their org members so we’ve added a shortcut on the homepage
- Making your current plan more visible — same thing as above, we weren’t doing a good job communicating what plan you’re currently using, when does your trial expires, etc. It’s solved now in the best way possible 🥰
- Big one — ability to upload your org logo in a rectangle format — we used to have it only in a circle, that was a very bad decision….don’t do that
- People’s favorite ✨— letting users change the base color of their homepage. This was originally thought to be an account-level functionality where the admins can change the org color. But after releasing it people bombarded us with emails, asking to “unlock” this for everyone and since we listen — we did it :)
So yea, that was it for July. Of course there were dozens of other small items that we updated as well, but I don’t think they are that important worth mentioning.
SmartSuite never sleeps so in the next month’s update (August update) I’ll tell you some more about :
- Further homepage (workspace) improvements
- Quick adding a linked record
- Smoother display of checklist items
- Enhancing grid functionalities — right click menu and adding record in a sorted grid
- I might reveal some of the big things we’re working on such as the big time updates on our SmartDoc, Field directory, Templates Center and much more :)
And of course we can’t go without this — follow SmartSuite guys 🎉. We’re really doing something great here and would love to hear your thoughts on anything — we’re not feedback shy !
SmartSuite across the web :
See you next month ! Cheers.
