Product Roadmap - Q3 2015

Aug 13 2015 read
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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.

Product Redesign

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.

redesign team scheduling

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:

  1. Using real-time search to go straight to what you need.
  2. Giving prominence to the screens all users need - especially the ones who only use the product to do their own work and log their own time.
  3. Moving the "module" functionality into its own, more subtle navigation area (to cut down on intimidation), and bulking it up with dedicated module home pages with fast access to existing navigation elements (saved filters) and making each module a destination in its own right.

3 nav rightFocusing 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).

Searching in the new AcceloMaking 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.

5 modules croppedMoving 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.

Reporting

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).

Stream Upgrade

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.

Stream featuring activities The stream featuring activities. Note the in-line options and the popup features showing you more info about conversation participants.

Stream with meta contentThe 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!

Creating & Updating in Mobile

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.

Approval & Invoicing Upgrade

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:

  • Enhancing time approval. While the current object-based time approval process is great for project and service managers who want to review and approve time in the context of their projects or issues, it doesn't work so well for people who need to approve the timesheets of their direct reports. As part of this upgrade, we'll be addressing the needs of these users to approve time by team member over the course of a week, saving a lot of time drilling down into individual projects.

  • Enhancing invoice creation. In a similar vein to the time approval piece, we're also planning enhancements to the way invoices are created as a batch process in Accelo. Improvements slated include an interface to create invoices for groups of projects (without having to go into every project), grouping multiple projects together in one invoice per client (without the need for contracts/retainers) and generally making it faster/easier to do your weekly/monthly billing for work done across the Accelo platform.

  • Enhancing invoice presentation & delivery. Another popular request from our users, this enhancement will build on some work we've been doing with Invoice Activity Reports (if you would like to beta test now, let us know), we'll be introducing a new set of invoice preferences (to share/provide a lot more information for clients) as well as generating all invoices in PDF format. Finally, we'll be introducing quantity and rate information into our accounting invoices so you'll be able to see this volume information pushed across into your accounting system.

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.

Mobile Apps - Push Notifications

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:

  • Getting a notification when a client you're in the middle of a sales process with opens an email you've sent them via Accelo - that way, you can quickly give them a call when you know they've opened your email for the first time.

  • Getting a notification when a client you're delivering a project for clicks on a link in an email you sent them for the first time (such as a link to a staging website or draft report) so you can also get straight back to them and get their instant feedback.

  • Getting a notification when a (prospective) client opens, approves or comments on a Quote you've sent them via Accelo's quote module.

  • Getting a notification whenever a client opens, approves or comments on a Signoff you send them as part of a project you're working on for them.

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.

Upgraded Client Portal

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.

… and other improvements

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!

Accelo Product Team - Wollongong, August, 2015

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!)

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