We're a bit delayed publishing our product roadmap update for Q3, mainly because we've been focusing on getting some progress to share - in pictures! - of what we're working on this quarter. We really hope you like what we've got coming in Accelo in months ahead!
Here's what we're focusing on over the next few months:
Given the scope of these quarterly priorities, it is important to note that we're deviating from the approach we've taken in the last few quarters of assigning (aspirational) timelines and designating these priorities for the quarter as something we expect to have delivered by the end of the quarter. Instead, these are the priorities we're working on this quarter, and given the scope of some of these priorities we expect that this list will keep us going well into Q4 of this year.
Accelo's current design has been in place since a few months after our launch - early 2012 - and we know as well as you do that it is looking a bit tired and dated. That's why we're currently focused on implementing a whole new user interface for Accelo.
A big part of our focus with this new design is on the part of Accelo that needs the most work - the navigation. One of the big challenges users share with us about Accelo is that it is "just soooo big" - there's a lot to take in, and looking at a navigation wall of options is intimidating, especially to new users.
The balance to strike in any change like this, of course, is to make the product more elegant and beautiful through simplification without hobbling power-users who want (and need) to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. We're tackling this by focusing on three principles:
Focusing users on the main things they need to use every day to do their job, like logging time and managing tasks.
Searching will be the way most users find what they're looking for in Accelo. We'll be supporting both "real time" search (with results popping up for easy immediate access) and our current listing screens (to make it easy to then further filter your results by other fields like created dates).
Making search the focus for finding what you need - and showing results fast and in-line.
In addition to the new look for the navigation, we're also working on redesigning the body sections of many of our screens to fit with this new style. And finally, from a visual perspective, we're aiming to give our users a few different options to work with visually so you can customize the color scheme to fit your business identity.
Moving the list of modules to its own navigation which is hidden behind the "hamburger" icon by default
From a performance perspective, we're also going to be changing the way the application works - the navigation will go from being a "header" for content in Accelo and will become - for most content pages - a persistent wrapper that the content will be loaded inside of using AJAX. Many of our most popular pages - Inbox, Team Scheduling, Task Board, Timesheet, Requests - are already set up for this, and we'll be making changes to a number of other pages - some up front, some gradually - to make them also well suited to living in this application framework (known as Angular). The consequence of this is that the time to load a new content screen will fall dramatically as the shell or core of the page is actually loaded up once through the new design shell and only the fresh/changed content will be pulled through.
The second big priority we're working on this quarter - and will continue working on for quarters to come - is around reporting. Accelo is at the center of our user's businesses, and contains a treasure-trove of real-time management information. From profitability to team utilization to client yield to project tracking and lots more, Accelo's data can share many valuable insights - both at a point in time and on a trend basis.
Currently, however, the reports and exports we have built into the product require too much effort to use or don't expose the information you need in a way you can use it. This quarter we're working hard on the reporting back-end and surfacing some of the results of this work in some front end reports, which we'll be continually adding to in the months ahead. If you've got reports that you'd love to be seeing in Accelo, feel free to suggest them in the comments (or in our ideas forum at ideas.accelo.com).
One of the improvements we did a lot of work on last quarter, but didn't quite get done, is the redesign of our activity stream. The objective was initially just to make the "activities" look better than the current text-heavy stream, but we decided that we wanted to also include other types of events in the stream - like a sale being won or a ticket changing status - and load them much more quickly than we do now. The result meant more than a visual change - we've decided to take advantage of the powerful search engine system that runs our real time search - but this meant a bunch more back-end work required to bring it to life.
The stream featuring activities. Note the in-line options and the popup features showing you more info about conversation participants.
The stream including more than just activities - keep track of what's been going on against your clients and work.
The good news is that there's a dedicated engineering team bringing this screen to life now, and we're looking forward to giving all of our clients a sneak peek in the near future - keep an eye on our blog for more details!
One of the priorities for this quarter that has already yielded dividends for our users is the ability to create (and in the future update) clients and contacts in our mobile apps.
Building on this foundation, we're looking forward to making it possible (and easy) to create more than company and contact records in Accelo - for example, making it easy for an account manager to create a new sales opportunity or a tech to create a new ticket straight from their phones.
In addition to the create functionality, we're also working on update functionality, with a special focus on status progressions. This will make it possible for a sales person to advance an opportunity, a project manager to update status or a tech to change the status on a ticket when they're on the road - the big challenge we haven't solved yet is how to handle the functionality of progression fields, activities and file uploads to make sure this feature doesn't break important business rules.
We knew it was going to be a pretty big job when we highlighted this priority back in mid Q2, but we underestimated it - there's a lot here! Our team are still working on this priority - making it easier to approve time and create invoices for multiple projects, tickets and other work in Accelo, and we're hoping to have an update in the next month or two.
The focal areas in this major upgrade include:
Given the scale/scope of these improvements it is likely that the delivery of all of these elements will stretch well into Q4, but we'll be introducing them in phases as soon as we can to get these important and time saving enhancements into your hands as soon as possible.
Responding to client requests, we decided to shuffle a few things around in mobile-land in Q2, and instead focused on the ability to create clients and contacts in Accelo (which we released out of beta this week). In addition to more work with creating and editing more things in Accelo's mobile apps this quarter, our team is also aiming to delivery another major enhancement - push notifications. While we're still finalizing the details, the plan is that users will be able to subscribe to push notifications for various events in Accelo and get near real-time notification when events occur.
Examples of events we're working to support this quarter include:
The plan is that these notification preferences will be configurable (such as "only show me sales where I'm the salesperson", or "only show me activity opens/clicks where I sent the activity", or "show me when a client opens an activity on a project I'm managing") and when the notification comes through you'll have easy access to view the activity, sale, project or client information when you click on it.
Our current client portal has been in place for almost two years and we've got a list of improvements we've been waiting to make for some time now. One of our priorities this quarter is to make a number of improvements to the client portal based on feedback from our clients - the #1 entry in the Ideas Forum ideas.accelo.com for example is to introduce whitelabelling, which we've been working on in the background.
In addition to white labelling, we're also working on a number of initiatives to make the client portal more truly collaborative. The new Stream - encouraging clients to participate in the stream - as well as inverting the access model (so you and your team don't have to manually go through and issue invitations to your clients) and finally making it easy for autoresponders to invite the clients who email you (when you're working on their projects, tickets or other work) with automated invitations are all high priorities for us to improve.
Over the last few months we've been on a bit of a hiring spree - we've pretty much doubled the size of the design, engineering and quality team over the last 12 months. With our newest engineering faces now through their boot-camp, we're excited to be seeing the benefits of hiring all these great people to ramp up our product firepower!
This means that in addition to the priorities in this roadmap, we'll also be delivering a steady stream of other improvements to the product - right now, for example, we've got team members finishing their Apple Watch and Android Wear applications, another group of engineers working on rebuilding our import system, more work being done on our real time search index and a devops team making a lot of infrastructure upgrades and low level system improvements to speed up performance.
Of course, if you've got any questions or you spot a bug, email [email protected] and if you've got a suggestion or idea, please share it at ideas.accelo.com (or if someone else has already shared it, enter a comment and vote for it!)
