Why We Revamped Our User Dashboard
Startups live and die based on their ability to adapt to change. We’ve been around for nearly five years now (which is almost an eternity in the startup world). In that time, our 7.2 million users have created more than 14 million visuals. While those are amazing numbers, and we’re grateful for every single one, we wouldn’t have survived in this space without our wonderful users and the ability and desire to adapt.
Our users expect a great experience every time they create something with us. For everyone on our team, from the backend Rails rangers to our sweeter-than-candy Customer Delight team, “good enough” is never enough. Our users deserve to be wowed.
While we started out as an infographic maker, we’ve become so much more than that. Whether it’s putting together a presentation for your startup or using our text frames to add some flare to stuff around the house, the list of things you can do with Piktochart gets longer every day.
With that in mind, we’re looking towards the future of Piktochart. We’ve made some changes to our interface and our code base to make sure that we’re ready for whatever the future holds. We want to make sure that Piktochart is a product that our users keep coming back to again and again.
The New User Dashboard
The first big change you might notice is our new dashboard. Piktochart started out as an infographic design tool. Over time, the product has grown to support presentation, report, and poster-style formats. We wanted our users to be able to find, at a glance, the format they’re looking for.
The best way to do that is to increase our users’ level of focus. We don’t want you to feel overwhelmed with the number of formats we have available. You come to us with an idea of what you want to create, and we want to help you get there. The goal of the new dashboard is to help you stay focused on the eventual output, not the steps it takes to get there.
The dashboard keeps all your options for visual formats in one place. It also shows your saved visuals right as you log in. By default, saved visuals are shown and sort by format. You can still sort by other criteria like last updated (ascending and descending) as well.
As a company, we don’t want to feel overwhelmed in development, maintenance, and tracking. That slows down progress. So we’ve made it easier for our engineering team to focus as well. The code base has been refactored to make things more modular, which should help us squash bugs and add more features and formats without getting bogged down with testing and quality assurance.
A Fresh Look in the Editor
You might also notice some visual changes in our editor. In order to achieve consistency in quality and maintain the visual aesthetic we developed for the latest Piktochart website redesign, we’ve added a fresh coat of paint to the place where users spend most of their time.
We’ve made a few small tweaks and revisions to the user interface to ensure that your experience in the editor is more intuitive and friendly. Not only does that make it easier on you, it also lessens the load on our customer delight team. Less confusion means they can spend more time polishing, refining, and improving your experience with Piktochart.
The truth is that of the 3.5 billion internet users, more and more of them are using Piktochart on their mobile devices. We want to be ready for that traffic, so we recently launched a HUGE update to our iOS app. In addition, some of the changes we’ve made to the interface make the editor more adaptable and responsive on smaller screens.
We’ve rearranged the header menu up top to make the interface more user-friendly, including making it easier to use the File and Profile menus. The output and presentation pages both have darker themes and new buttons for easier access to common functions and much-needed information. You’ll also notice a re-styled side menu with minimal icons and easy access to the options you look for most often.
Finally, on the coding side, our Bootstrap framework has been updated, and the code has been refactored for better sustainability. Just like with the addition of the dashboard, our goal is to make our code more modular so that we can move quickly and make the additions and improvements that our users want and deserve.
Enjoy the changes, and keep an eye out for more in the future. Let us know what you think about the changes to the interface. Give the new dashboard a try, then give us your feedback. We want you, our users, to love using Piktochart as much as we do. The best way for us to make sure we’re putting you first is to listen. So drop us a line in the comments or hit us up on Twitter.
For tips on startup culture and advice on how visual storytelling can improve your skills as a designer, marketer, and educator, check out our blog at http://piktochart.com/blog.
Originally published at piktochart.com on November 28, 2016.
