My take on improvising Zoho chat's existing visual appeal. Layout does not change much. Only the visual appeal gets a over-haul.

Looks good and more easy to understand I guess. What do you say? :-)

1. The Add Event, Chat history and Background image controls were moved to top-right.
2. The Quick Message and Embed Chat gadgets gets some visual upgrade.
3. The main Chat users list gets revamped icons and some improved visual upgrades.
4. The Embed Chat gadget does not reveal the options as it was before, but.. rolls down to reveal, when the user clicks on the "grip" at the bottom of the gadget.

 

- Rajesh

Just a quick thought...

How about showing the activities, updates on the top, above all the information for a Lead? sample below.. just ignore the colors of the UI shown below.

2011 is going to be a wonderful year for Zoho CRM in terms of better user experience and features.

As we add more and more add-ons to the CRM product, the Activate Users UI needs some tweaking to accomodate those new add-ons. So, I present an Idea which could be a good solution without compromising usability and experience.

The goals are -

- The user's list should be visible very clearly.
- Add-ons for each user should be shown too.
- The UI should give the current status of the User's activation status.
- The user status should be visible separately from add-ons activation.
- All add-ons and their status (activated / not-activated) should be clearly visiable and their names should be readable
- Enabling / disabling the user or an add-on should be simple and easy. The operation should use the minimal clicks if not, optimal number of clicks.

Considering the above goals.. I sketched a couple of versions starting from a simple update - introducing icons to each add-ons and grouping the columns. But when I thought about the scalability, it faced issues. So I extended the UI and ended up with the below shown UI.



At any time, a simple glance will show the add-ons enabled for individual users. Also the green-red colors will show whether the users are activated or disabled.  Also in the edit-mode, the simple check-boxes ensure the selections / clicking is easy and straight-forward.

After designing this UI and testing, X questions popped out.
1. How do I know the number of licenses remaining for each add-on? There should be a way to display the license numbers on-screen.
2. Will this work for companies that has more than 50 users? How will the UI handlelisting of more than 50 users? Pagination? Search? Sort-by?

Now I have some thing to keep my mind busy over the weekend. :-) If you have any ideas, suggestions, feel free to share.

Happy New Year!

Holiday ahead.. and so a off-topic post. 


The stages in designing 3D styled icon.

















and finally...



:-) Happy holidays

- Team Zoho CRM

The idea is to create an alert inline. This will replace the current interaction method of moving to a new screen to create an alert. Similar pattern to be followed for Tasks and Field Updates.

Well here is a teaser..

The current Workflow settings UI is being updated and a interactive prototype has been prepared now. Will undergo tests and iterations. Soon you will see this in Zoho CRM. :-)



One key change is - the follow-up is joined to the Immediate Actions . It is too early to post anything solid, that's why a thumbshot of the early mockup we did is posted above.  More updates later.

A couple of days ago, Perumal NS of Zoho CRM team brought us home made delicious Rava laadu, Rasa vadai.. and mini-medhu-vadais for his birthday... :-) 


Ready to be served...




Attack!

We integrated a local CRM build with the suggested UI flow and did some testing with users familiar with Workflow rule creation, as well as new users. And the results we observed were not satisfactory. One major thing we noted from existing users is - Users prefer everything to be shown in a single screen. This was bit opposite to what we observed duing the mockup test. So we have decided to fix the interaction flow now.

I am thinking of another flow - Dividing the complete UI into parts and showing the first part initially. When the user fills the first part and clicks "Next" the second part will be revealed / shown. The same pattern is carried for the rest of the UI.Thus when you complete this process you will have all the parts in the same (single) UI. Have to test this soon.

Creation of "Follow-ups" (a new feature) is what seemed to be difficult for the users. So I am trying to integrate both the Creation of action items (sending alerts, setting up tasks etc) and Follow-ups together in a single UI. Will post more tomorrow. Till then.. here are some white-board captures .. (may not make sense sometimes... :-) )


An idea... of showing the Things to do..



Another idea...


Summing up the flow in my mind...