This is the first post in our user experience (UX) discussion series featuring our new dashboard. Many of you are really excited about the new dashboard and want a say in how it eventually turns out. So we thought it would be good for us to share our design considerations, and to have an open discussion with everyone involved. As usual, constructive feedback will be most welcomed:
- Highlight specific situations where your usability is compromised.
e.g. “when I’m on a small netbook screen, I’m only able to see very few visitors” - Leave out emotive, unqualified comments – they are likely to be overlooked
e.g. “I like the brown look, it gives more OOMPH”
We serve 40,000+ businesses, and have the responsibility to make decisions benefitting the general user population. That means not everyone can be 100% satisfied. But we do aim to keep many of you reasonably delighted.
Summary: Give us your feedback, then give us your trust!
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Episode One – New Dashboard, Fresh Beginning
As we close in on the release date of our brand new dashboard, we’re really keen to share some behind-the-scene discussions we had about User Interface (UI) improvements.
Having an existing dashboard was a great start, since we’ve gotten almost two years worth of user feedback / criticisms. The pain points that were highlighted became the reference point in our very first design iteration.
Pain points
For example, a major pain was that for a busy website, the “Visitor List” didn’t work too well, since it became rather long and disorganized. Serving customers on a first-come-first-served basis became a challenge as well.
Current Vistor List
This was why we added a prominent “Serve Next” button that immediately puts you in a chat with the longest-waiting visitor.
Serve Request
We also allowed you to neatly “Group” visitors (e.g. by country / by URL).
NEW Visitor List
During the life cycle of the old dashboard, we’ve also been guilty of adding features that felt disjointed from the rest of the UI. With a revamped design, we had a chance to rethink how these features should work together. Factoring in our product roadmap, we also tried to future-proof our design as much as possible.
User Testing
After countless design iterations (and heated debates!), we arrived at our very first prototype last year, and were ready for early user testing. This was where we are thankful for the handpicked group of customers, who spent their precious time on Skype with our product team.
As we anticipated, there was a mixed reception to the initial prototype. While everyone loved the new clean look, we also got amazing feedback about common use cases we inadvertently overlooked. One of them is the ability to visualize how each and every visitor is moving through your website, in real time. We realized many of you love stalking.. er following visitors as they surfed from page to page (and it’s not really a bad thing). This inspired the new visualization feature on the dashboard. You can now stalk to your hearts’ delight.
Visualization
In future episodes, we will discuss some of these topics in further depth
- Impact of Framework on UX
- Scalable Visitor List
- Efficient Chat Experience
- Visualization
Get Early Access
[Update: 23 July 2012]
If you signed up for Zopim after 17 July 2012, you will automatically be brought to the new dashboard.
For users who signed up before 17 July 2012, read this post to see how you can easily switch to the new dashboard.
As we rolled out refinements and quick design changes on a bi-weekly basis, our pool of happy beta dashboard users also grew. We’re now confident of rolling this out on a larger scale. So here’s how you can get your hands on our spanking new dashboard:
If you are the account owner, get early beta access by filling up the short form on www.zopim.com/account/betaaccessOnce this is done, all your agents would be able to access the beta dashboard on beta.zopim.com
There is a prominent “Feedback” button in the Dashboard. This goes straight to the product team. You can also leave your comments on this blog =)
http://www.zopim.com/account/betaaccess produces a 404 not found error at the moment.
Correction…the link is just bad…the actual address is correct. Thanks!
I get a 404 error when trying to access the URL to sign-up for Beta access. Is it still possible to sign-up?
@joel @DelMar Thanks for pointing this out. Our bad! The link has been corrected.
I would love to see the ability of using this on an iPad.
Sir , Can you please make taps eye catching at one instance if you can .. I mean a bit bigger . I can not find which button i where . The current version is almost good for this . But please make some improvements
Sorry could you elaborate on what you mean by ‘make taps eye catching’?
I like the look and feel as well as some of the new features/functionality of the new dashboard. Unfortunately however we have been unable to use it since we rely on having the shortcuts listed while in a chat. Perhaps we merely missed this function (which would make more sense than it not being there), but having to remember all of the shortcuts is certainly not an option and even if we did, it is often easier to see them and just click while chatting.
Thx for your feedback Marc. We’ll continue monitoring the feedback we are receiving and to think of ui improvements based on them
Trying to connecto to beta access but always stuck in starting screen displaying the message “waiting for server to be ready”
Maybe I’m doing something wrong?
Still having this problem? It might have been down for a short period
I read somewhere that the new dashboard will be multilingual. Is it right ? We have customers interested in your product but most of them aren’t confortable with English
That’s 50% correct =) We’ve built in localization support in our new dashboard. However, at the moment, most of the phrases are still Google Translated. We’re waiting for closer to our launch date (when most of the content in the dashboard is finalized) before engaging an agency to help clean up the translations.
Thanks for your answer.
Still having a “Waiting for server to be ready” problem when i go to the zopim dashboard.
What’s the problem with this “Waiting for server to be ready”? My internet connection is steady…how can it be fixed?
“Waiting for server to be ready”: i encountered since Tuesday until now, Thursday. How can it be fixed?
A small percentage of customers are facing the “Waiting for server to be ready” problem. Usually happens for customers behind a firewall. We’re rolling out upgrades to fix this, in the meantime please try classic.zopim.com to access the dashboard. We’ll update here as soon as the fix is in place