get real or die

We have been quiet for a while and with some good reasons. We are working hard to get some important updates shipped as soon as possible.

These updates include:

• Custom Lead Types support. (have as many forms and custom fields as you want)
• Custom Lead Identifier selection (a popular feature request. Select how you’d like to view and search leads by)
• Multiple actions in the lead and deals section (you’ll be able to delete, assign, share, etc multiple leads at the same time)
• The first iteration of our API to handle web-to-dashboard.
• Working on a paid version (more info to follow this)

We want to take this opportunity to thank everybody that has been with us since day one. You’ve helped us build dashboard to what it is today. We are working diligently to make dashboard the one tool you can’t live without.

So, what else is new? We are hiring!
Yes, we are going at it again! In an effort to get our product development moving forward we are in need of a couple of talented folks:

• We are looking for a Back-End Guru. We need one or two individuals that can quickly become familiar with what we have going on here and help us make our app a better one. Check this out for more info.
• We also need a UI Guru. Simply put, if you like our current UI and you think you can do it better, then here is where you belong. Check this out for more details
• Lastly, we have one internship position open for someone with knowledge of technical writing. We have to start documenting our software and creating help documents.

Quick word from the dashboard crew. For the passed 2 weeks we’ve been hard at work and we are glad to push this small but powerful update:

Printing Leads
Dashboard now looks pretty even on print. You can now print leads by going to the properties section of the leads. We have created a clean and simple layout for leads to be printed. We are committed to saving trees and we do take this initiative seriously, so please be responsible when printing leads.

Who accessed that lead and when?
For your security we added a feature to accounts that have more than one user. You’ll now be able to tell who last access a lead and when. Just a nice security feature - which is available when you have more than 1 person in your account.

Lead History
Yet another useful feature. This is specially good for collaboration when you want to get an idea of what has been happening with a lead. This little link will give you a quick overview of all the activities that dashboard tracks. It’s located at the bottom of the “quickies” section.

E-mail notifications
Which can all be toggled on & off from your user profile page. We are letting you know when you have a new lead shared with you or assigned to you by default. If you want to get more notifications you can turn them on there as well.

Dashboard hit 1000 accounts sometime last Monday! We’re very excited about this - many different companies have signed up for dashboard; Real Estate Brokers, Web Development Houses, NBA Franchises, Financial Trading Firms, Magazines, Law Firms, Production companies & EVEN Air Conditioning companies find it useful!

On another note - we’ve been kind of quiet. We know that we haven’t been vocal on our blog in the past few weeks, but that’s only because we have had our heads deep in thought - focusing solely on improving dashboard.

What’s new?

Filters: We understand that you need to be able to view certain leads based on criteria. We made a way to do that - filter out leads that are not important to you by selecting what is important from the drop downs in the lead/deal listing sections. (Filter based on Lead Type, Status, Source, Lead Owner or Tags)

Sorting: This suggestion came up a few times. You can now sort your leads by clicking on lead name, date, status, source or lead owner from the lead/deal listing sections. (See image above)

Tags: Organize your leads in a different way - we created colorful tags. (See image below)

Foreign Currency: This may be the second most useful feature for our users - How do we know? Because you asked for it!? You can now set your account currency to one of fourteen different international currencies.

What else has changed?

Ubiquitous “Add lead button”: This feature request has come true. Click on the box icon with a plus on it next to the search.

Improved Activity Feed: We’ve made the feed a bit richer with information - you can now see when new users are added to your account. The feed will continually be improved - so look for more changes in the future.

Improved CSV file Importing: We’ve improved the speed/reliability of the CSV uploader - but we’re going to tweak it some more in the coming weeks.

A lot more: Form data is retained when you mess up adding a lead. We’ve taken steps to improve support for Internet Explorer 7 & 8. Also - we’ve taken care of a lot of little bugs that have to do with notes, todos & documents.

So what is next?

Lead Types: This is definitely the MOST requested feature - we’re debating how to push this out. This would allow you to identify leads by what is most important to you and collect information that is vital to your business. You could get a surprise as early as next week.

Avatars: Soon you will be able to put up your own pictures for users. We’re going to get these out to you in a few weeks.

Data export: We believe your data is yours and should be free (and you do too, of course). We’re going to be allowing export of data in CSV & XML format.

Update: The nice folks at Useful Tools gave a pretty good writeup! We definitely recommend them. As always - we are available for support - just hit the “feedback” button or give us a call. We would love to hear how we can improve. Thanks for your support and we appreciate all of you.

We have a scheduled down time this evening to update our servers with the newest version of dashboard.

We expect a short window of downtime - approximately 15-20 minutes from 5 to 5:15PM EST. Please make sure you complete any necessary tasks by 4:45 to ensure none of your data goes missing. Thanks!

One of the things that I have wanted in our software from day one is a live feed of dashboard’s business/work related activities. Because lets be honest, everybody wants to know what’s going on. A live feed allows us to know things as they are happening, in real time.

It doesn’t matter if you are a sales person, a developer, a firefighter or whatever you are, WE ARE ALL SOCIAL CREATURES. Nowadays the concept of publishing activities of the things we are doing, actions we are taking, music we are listening to, etc, just makes sense and since we are SOCIAL, we feed off of one another.

Now, let’s bring this concept to our workplace. I want to bring a feed of business/work related activities into dashboard in a non-intrusive and non-distracting way. We have setup our platform (dashboard) in such way were we can push information to our users real time (without refreshing the page), this opens up the doors to a LIVE, real time feed of information and business activities performed by dashboard users.

As a manager, wouldn’t it be nice to know in real time what your agents are doing, even if they are not at your office? Wouldn’t it be nice to know if they are working or not, or even know a bit about what’s going on in their life. As an agent that needs to collaborate with co-workers, wouldn’t it be nice to know what your co-workers are doing real time, what activities or actions they are accomplishing or what leads are being converted into deals.

I think that “THE LIVE FEED” more than being a nice feature to have, it is an indispensable tool to anybody, especially when managing or working with a team. In any business, accountability and transparency are essential, I would even say that they directly influence productivity and results. Bringing a live feed into dashboard, allows for this kind of real business checks.

So, how do we bring this into dashboard without disrupting or affecting the focus on the work flow you and/or your team needs to follow? We have come up with some concepts as you can see.

VS.

There will be a page where you can see the entire live feed, the images above describes how we could display it while in any page of the application. As we build this capability into dashboard in the months to come, I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

First, let’s start by defining what a lead is: “A lead is a set of data that contains some type of contact information.”

Leads in dashboard are treated as a set of data to which you can attach reminders, notes, and files. Eventually, through the use of dashboard apps you’ll be able to do way more interesting things with any particular data set/lead.

So, let me give you a simple example. Dashboard comes with one default lead type, the “General” lead type. This set of data includes: First name, Last Name, etc, Company Info, Address & Contact Info.

Dashboard enables multiple lead types to be handled within an account. This is great for multiple product vendors out there. For example, if you are a web design company and you need to collect  different lead types, say e-commerce leads, database development leads, and Informational website leads, you can manage them all within one dashboard account.

Coming soon, you will be able to select from a catalog of lead types containing leads that make the mortgage, insurance, web design industry and others happy. Oh and by the way, once we enable our API you’ll be able to create your own lead types.

A big thank you to all of you that have signed up and are now testing dashboard. 6 days later, over 300 accounts, 10,000 leads and 220 to-dos! We could not be happier, we really underestimated the power of the internet.

So what’s ahead for dashboard?
We have been doing a bit of debugging since last week but I think the most important thing is we have started to optimize our app. This is going to be over a month long work effort, after that, we are going to work on a couple of additional features and quickly release our second iteration of dashboard.

Why am I so excited?
if I could only express in words how excited I am about the numbers that we have achieved so far!

But that’s not why I am so excited, I’m excited because we have some really cool ideas that we are going to implement, some of them have to do with social features, some have to do with real time feeds / updates / chat. Also, the fact that we have been building dashboard as a platform excites me even more. We are also going to be implementing automated lead routing. We have more ideas that we are going to try and see if they stick.

Now… We are going to LeadsCon… wanna know why? We’ll tell you all about it in a couple of days…

Again, thank you for all your feedback and keep it coming.

Moment by moment. We are putting “dashboard” live…

Today is Friday February 20th. at 11AM… nobody at the office yet (except for me) everybody worked late yesterday, besides we moved into our “temporary office” across the street from where our offices will be.

This what we all have been waiting for, cross your fingers, knock on wood, get ready trusty servers here it comes….

Update 11:52. Tom is here… working already… We are having Internet problems…

Update 12:30 Auston is here… everybody working.

Update 7:38 Everybody still at work… but our first iteration of the site is already live. www.leadlogsys.com

Update 11:14 PM we are still here. fixing bugs…

Have you been wondering where the heck are we? Well… certainly hard at work. Late nights that turn into early mornings, countless coca-colas and lots of caffieneated drinks. We are almost ready for a private show. We thank everybody that has signed up for our beta testing program. We will be communicating with you shortly to provide you with invites. Keep checking that email of yours!

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on designing UI for the early stages of your application.

I’ve seen lots of apps that have no initial directions or start pages. You login and you are somewhere in the application with no context or explanation whatsoever of what to do. That’s rude! Here are some of my thoughts:

1. If your app is something really simple and requires little to no interaction for the users to get it working or for you to provide a service, great! Make sure you are laying out your navigation correctly and you should be good to go, you can use HIDE/SHOW help tips to guide users a bit but for the most part a user should be able to interact with your app on their own.
2. If your app requires some setup then I think short video(s) will do the trick. I think a tutorial video for a particular section of your application should last about 1 to 2 minutes. If you are doing a tutorial for the entire application then I would suggest a 4 to 5 minute video with an overall explanation of the application, its core features and then tell people to watch the rest of the videos for specific instructions on each individual section.I would also recommend having a visual helper feature. I’ve seen this in the Yahoo! email platform. Every item they wanted me to know about or understand, they highlighted by walking me through with a bit of explanation on the screen.
3. If your app requires some advanced setup then I would suggest walking them through the process and have them go straight to the pages of the system that you need them to interact with, while providing them with specific instructions on each of these pages. Your users will appreciate the “GUIDE ME THROUGH” experience. I really liked the way Facebook walked me through the process of creating an account and finding people that I know on Facebook, one friend lead to the other etc, etc, you know the drill. My mom uses Facebook and she is 62 years old. Talk about great design and intuitive navigation.
4. If your app requires the user to INTERACT with it before you can actually provide them with a service (ie: Google analytics) then it is a good idea to direct the user to the necessary action page and away from any page that is not related to the action you need them to perform. I suggest you also follow up with automated emails and in case the user still doesn’t get it, set up email reminders and invite them to come back to the application and complete the necessary tasks. You may also want to provide them with a video tutorial and directly speak with them.

It is extremely important to make sure your users know exactly what to do right as soon as they get to the first page of your application. Their idea of your company will be formed within the first 5 to 10 minutes of interaction with your application.