Accelo v4 Public Beta Launch

We are excited to announce a big moment in our product journey — the public beta release of Accelo v4! After many quarters of research and hard work, we are eager to share the next evolution of Accelo with our incredible users.

In this article, you will find details about what this beta contains, instructions on how to activate it, how you can provide feedback, current known feature limitations and an outline of what’s next.

Introducing the New v4 View Screen Structure

As you can see in the image below, there is a new structure to all the new Accelo v4 screens. Towards the top of each screen, you will see a universal Info Bar and Hub. These elements are meant to bring you the most important fields about your work above the fold of the page. The bar along the width of the page is the Info Bar, which will have in-line editable fields.

On the left end of the Info Bar, you will find a down arrow button that opens up the Hub. Inside of the Hub are secondary, but still important, fields related to the work you are viewing. This is designed to keep the power of Accelo while reducing complexity for casual users.

If at any point you need to do something that the beta doesn’t support, you can select the “Classic View” button.

You will find that the Overview tab of each new view screen has been restructured. The Overview will be the main hub of each work screen, giving you the most important information in different sections of the tab. To complement the Overview tab, there is also a new and improved Details tab on each view screen. This will house all of your custom fields as well as other types of information about the work that you deem important.

The Stream will still be a prominent tab on each view screen, but never the main starting tab. You will see an updated user interface for Events and Message threads in the Stream, with a new filter option as well. The Stream has more improvements that are still yet to come.

New Sales View in Accelo v4

The first part of Accelo v4 we released is now available in public beta. In this update, we focused on helping salespeople and managers understand where every opportunity is at a glance — with summaries and meetings (now known as events) now prominent whenever you go to view a Sale. Additionally, we’ve brought important custom fields and quotes into the new Sales Overview, and now you can easily see the history of a sales opportunity to ensure you’re staying on top of velocity.

New Ticket View in Accelo v4

The Ticket view, which we released in alpha back in May, is also now available in public beta. For this view, we focused on helping service team members to understand what needs to be done with a prominent display on the left of the screen. We also elevated the placement of important custom fields in the Overview interface. On the right of the view, we make it easy to see the last client interaction — because knowing who last worked on something, and when, is so critical to delivering great service. The Overview also includes the history of the ticket to understand the work that has been done already.

New Project View in Accelo v4

The Project view, which we released in alpha back in October, is now also available in public beta. We focused on the breakdown of the project through its milestones and tasks, with an emphasis on key dates and either time or financial budget information always available. We’ve kept the focus on Flood Bars to show how things are progressing at a glance and since there’s now a lot more information underneath the Flood Bar, we used a new hover effect to make it easier to see the contributions to usage and budgets.

The Project view is the first place we introduced our new Drawers functionality. These Drawers are panels that slide in from the right-hand side of the screen to provide additional information without you needing to leave the screen. We’ll be using them a lot more in Accelo v4 as we roll out more screens into 2024. You can access a Project Drawer for detailed budget information, as well as a Drawer for each Milestone or Task, by clicking on them. See below for more details about our Task upgrade.

Task Upgrade in Accelo v4

Given Accelo v4 is all about making our product easier to use, we’ve introduced a brand-new Task experience with our new version. While the old task experience was powerful — with checklists, dates, budgets and more — it was also a bit unwieldy. Because of this, we’ve put a lot of work into simplifying the user interface and moving it so you can interact with tasks without covering almost all of your screen.

This new pattern, which we call a Drawer, allows the interface for creating a Task and viewing a Task to slide out from the right-hand side. This allows you to see more of what is on your screen than the old UI, and we’ve also simplified the creation and viewing process to be less intimidating while remaining powerful.
 

 Activity Upgrade in Accelo v4

Tracking the work you’ve done for your clients is a critical part of Accelo, and we also know this work can happen in a variety of ways. It could be an internal log of work, an email you’ve sent to your client or colleagues or a meeting you’ve booked (be it in person or on a call). Either way, tracking your activity as you do work for clients is key.

Prior to Accelo v4, we had a large, and sometimes confusing, interface for logging these activities. We also had a separate interface for logging your time and work, which actually went into the same place even though it looked different.

With the Accelo v4 upgrade, we’ve made a few big changes to simplify the experience. There are now three separate interfaces that are more clearly labeled and designed to be easier to use:

Log Work. This is similar to the old Log Time experience, or creating a quick note in the Stream. The focus is on logging time and/or providing details about your work. This is also where logging a call happens due to our users sharing that the old approach was a bit confusing and left them wondering if they were sending an invite to a call or just entering that one had happened.  

Create Message. This is the same as the old Email type of activity or a Note sent to a colleague, and it is a supercharged Compose experience. In addition to recipients, subject, body (with rich text) and attachments, the Message interface also includes live time tracking, privacy settings and more. We decided to rename it to Message to be more consistent with other products our clients are using. 

Create an Event. This is the same as the old Meeting type of activity, and it handles the same sorts of things you’d expect from creating an event in Google Calendar or Microsoft 365. The decision to rename it from Meeting to Event was to be more consistent with the other products our clients are using and allow it to be more flexible (since so many client and team events are actually Zoom calls and not in-person meetings).

• Attachments within Stream in-line replies, Create Message and Log Work drawers

• Support for in-line images when sending a message

• Load performance when displaying files within the Attachments tab

• Editing dates in the Task Drawer

How To Opt in to the Accelo v4 Beta

Step 1 - Enable Accelo v4 Beta at Account-level

First, an admin user of your account must turn on v4 Beta Accessibility. Then, users will be able to individually opt in to the beta experience.

The following toggle will become available on the General Settings page:

1. Go to Settings (bottom left corner of Accelo)

2. Select General Config

3. Select Beta Features

4. Set v4 Beta to Yes

5. Select Save

To disable, an admin user may access this screen and toggle v4 Beta to No. When an admin user toggles v4 Beta off, v4 Beta will be disabled for all account users regardless of their user settings. Their user setting is remembered, so if an admin toggles v4 Beta back on, the user's previous setting will take effect again.

Step 2: Enable Accelo v4 Beta on a User-level

When an account has v4 Beta Accessibility turned on, all users of the account will have the option of toggling v4 Beta on and off for themselves.

Users can do so from User Preferences:

1. Hover over your account icon in the upper right corner of Accelo

2. Select User Preferences

3. Select Labs Settings

4. Toggle v4 Beta to On

5. Select Save
   

How To Provide Feedback

In each of the new Accelo v4 view screens, you will see an in-app "Share Feedback" button that allows you to provide your feedback and suggestions. There will be a short series of questions that you are able to answer in this survey.

You will also have the ability to create new ideas on the Ideas Forum, using the "Feedback" button in the bottom left-hand menu of Accelo. When creating a new idea, please make sure to put your idea into the correct v4 Feedback category.

Features No Longer Supported in Accelo v4

In an effort to make the product simpler to use and due to extremely low usage, the following features will no longer be supported in Accelo v4.

• Ability to split Tasks. We have some exciting news about handling multiple task assignees to share in the near future!

• Upcoming Work section on Tickets and Sales view screens. These are replaced by new panels for Tasks and Events (Meetings).

• Star rating on Sales

• Budget and Work tab on Tickets. This has been moved to other panels and tabs.

• Bookings (scheduling tool). This will be revisited and reimagined in 2024.

Accelo v4 Glossary of Terms

• “Classic” vs v4:

  • “Classic” refers to any part of Accelo that was established prior to the Accelo v4 UI/UX improvements.

  • v4, or Accelo v4, is the term we will use for all of our new screens and upgrades.

• Drawers: Drawers is our new term for the right-hand slider panels that you will see on various screens. Unlike the modals in Classic, Drawers allow you to interact with the content behind them to achieve tasks and gain further context more efficiently without navigating away from the current page.

• Activity:

  • In Accelo v4, we are decoupling “Activity” from logging work and instead we will be referring to the specific Drawers:

    • Internal Notes with no recipient will become a Work Log or a Log

    • Notes with a recipient(s) and External Emails will become a Message

    • A Call can be logged from the Log Work Drawer and will remain a Call (sometimes referred to as Call Logs, as they have no recipients and no “to:” field)

    • Meetings will become Events

    • Postal will no longer be supported

• Info Bar and Hub:

  • The Info Bar is a container that holds information you’ll need to check regularly. Each view screen displays different components in the Info Bar, much of which is editable. The Info Bar is a bar that runs across the width of the screen at the top of the page and contains the Hub.

  • The Hub is a new type of two-column container designed to reduce the cognitive load of an Overview but ensure information, such as Company and Contact details, are easily accessible. The Hub can be accessed via the down arrow button on the left of the Info Bar.

• Sentiments:

  • Sentiments are colors used to give you a health check on the progress of your work. For example, green implies success, orange is a warning and red implies danger or an error. You’ll also see icons tied to the sentiments. Sentiment colors appear throughout Accelo v4, most commonly in Flood Bars, but also within Chips, Date Badges and more.

We hope you enjoy the new Accelo v4 beta experience! If you haven't already, make sure to check out our Accelo v4 Progress Update for more details about what's still to come. And once you've had a chance to explore the beta, we encourage you to share your feedback. We look forward to hearing from you!