the Senokian blog - things that interest us: design, software, business and the odd random musing. Check out our products (below right) or visit the Senokian site.
We’ve been metaphorically, and literally snowed under at various points since December and wanted to let you know what has been going on:
We’re going to release all of these changes over the next few weeks and will let you know when via our newsletters.
The brief: Tactile CRM’s website is need of an overhaul, and as part of the plan this year we’re measuring and reporting on the the changes we make to see what is and isn’t succussful. We want to increase our conversion ratio on sign ups so we’re currently doing some market research on sites that people have felt comfortable buying from and leaving the credit card details.
The current list includes:
Are there anymore you have brought from, or can suggest?
We’re pleased to announce the second of two new features you’ll find in Tactile CRM this week – new graphs and reports.
Tactile CRM is a great way to manage your sales process and keep on top of clients. Now with the new graph/reporting facilities you can now easily keep track of your sales history, pipeline, and use the information to find out your most profitable sources of leads and type of work.
We’ve also added extra data below the graphs to see the exact values and now allow you to change the date ranges too.
This is the first release of our new reporting module and we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for further graphs/reports.
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We’re pleased to announce the first of two new features you’ll find in Tactile CRM this week – FreshBooks integration.
After feedback and suggestions from users, you can now view your FreshBooks invoices against organisations within Tactile CRM. Staff can easily see the purchase history/habits and current status of invoices paid/part paid/overdue and use this information when contacting clients and making business decisions.
Setting up FreshBooks/Tactile CRM is easy, enter your FreshBooks API and you’re away.
You can even import your clients from FreshBooks and add new clients from within Tactile CRM to keep your information up to date.
This is the first release of our new FreshBooks integration and we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions.
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As part of today’s new release of our award winning simple CRM for small businesses - Tactile CRM, we made one major change that should make our lives a lot easier, and keep things easy to use for people using Tactile CRM.
We’ve merged the ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ tabs to become ‘Organisations’.
Previously Tactile CRM had the concept of clients and leads. When we built the system we made a concious decision to seperate out clients (companies/organisations you actually work with/sell to) and leads (companies/organisations you are talking with, but don’t yet work with, or would like to work with).
This decision was based upon our work at Senokian with companies building bespoke web software systems to enable their CRM systems. Traditionally the work was with larger corporates and this distinction was needed to help keep their systems neat and tidy. We thought this would be a great concept to bring to Tactile CRM, however we were wrong.
Analysing the database and our user stats we can now see that most people don’t use the ‘Leads’ functionality, and with the addition of the new tag features, it isn’t really needed. We also tended to get a reasonable number of support requests asking what the difference between Clients and Leads, or Leads and Opportunities were.
Tactile CRM version 2 now has the ‘Organisations’ tab which has all the ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ together - for users that did use the Leads tab, we have automatically tagged all the ‘Leads’ with the tag ‘Lead’. If you don’t want this tag, you can use the new tag features to easily remove it.
We hope that you find this new feature useful, and would love to hear any comments or feedback that you may have.
Today is a big day for Tactile CRM, our small business contact and sales management system - we have just released Version 2.
After listening to our users feedback we have implemented a lot of new features around Tags. The new features are available via the ‘Tags’ tab and allow you to easily view all items with a specific tag (see the screenshot below) as well as being able to rename/merge tags, delete a tag, delete all items with a specific tag (if you are an admin), and search across all items (organisations, people, opportunities, and activities) with a specific tag as well as being able to drill down on specific tag combinations:
We’ve also added a new tag cloud so that you can easily see the most popular tags and drill down on them - a bigger text-size means the tag is used on more items (organisations/people/opportunities/activities).
We hope that you find this new feature useful, and would love to hear any comments or feedback that you may have.
The team behind Tactile CRM - the easy to use contact and sales management system for small businesses, are pleased to announce version 2 of our award winning CRM software.
We’ve spent a while tinkering under the hood and adding some great new features that our users have requested, and we hope you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait. There are some big changes and updates this time - so, a drum roll please for our new version:
We’ve nominated ourselves for the Crunchies 2008! If you are feeling in a helpful mood, we’d love for you to help us out by nominating Tactile CRM in any, or all of the following categories:
I’m currently playing with some potential new interface tweaks for Tactile CRM, our easy to use CRM/contact and sales management system for small businesses - these aren’t definite and are an internal work in progress.
One factor that needs to be considered is how the interface works across browsers. The current tweaks use rounded course to add a bit of ‘eye candy’, however these only work in Safari and Firefox using their built in rounded corners support in CSS. Internet Explorer doesn’t currently support this.
So the question is, how far should we as designers go towards making things pixel perfect across all browsers?
My thoughts are as followers - functionally we should make the UI work across all browsers we support (IE6/7/safari/firefox/opera), but let the UI degrade to square corners when not available.
I think it’s important to carry on support IE6 (see the Huddle blog post) and let the users deal with an upgrade for the latest and greatest features when they feel the need - we can better spend our time on new features.
We’ve recently been working on some exciting new features for Tactile CRM, which we doing final testing on and hope to release this month. Watch this space.
Whilst Team Tactile have been working on the underlying code, we’ve also been contemplating some interface changes. Now we don’t mess around with mockups in Photoshop, with some of the excellent plugins available for Firefox, including the Web Developer Tool Bar, Firebug, and Stylish, we can quickly and easily work on the interface and see how it actual works in the browser, so we can have some user testing thrown in for free.
One thing we’ve been thinking about is moving to a fixed width design. Mocking this up with the plugins in the browser took about half an hour and the result is below. This may never make it into production, but we’d love your feedback as to which you prefer.
As displays get bigger, presenting text in a fluid layout becomes more of a challenge as it has a tendency to spread out onto a single line. Working with a fixed width also gives us more potential when working on reporting/graphs.
The screenshot below is the current layout for comparision.
What are your thoughts, and which do you prefer?