My ‘Favourite’ Feature Ever

Thursday, 6th August 2020

This is a copy of a post originally posted on my LinkedIn account.

As Martin Port and the rest of us at BigChange continue to strive towards making the 4-day working week a reality in 2021 we increase the likelihood of this happening by introducing a feature which can save each user of our system 1 hour per week….how can you not be interested in that?!

It might have been another a month since I wrote the last entry, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy…boy have we been busy. Last month we introduced loads of new functionality to our product including (but not limited to); more granular control around administration, displaying worksheets as a flow chart, and updated our method of whitelisting IP addresses to make it more intuitive to users.

With all that excitement however I forgot to write about it, yeh I know some of you might have enjoyed the quiet, but I’m back here, and I want to share with you something that was included in our release last night.

This feature is perhaps the biggest ‘small’ addition we have added in a long time, and it can save you 7 seconds each time you do a common task. Whilst 7 seconds might not seem like a lot, we found our users were doing this task upwards of 100 times a day, that’s 12 minutes a day saved (yeh I rounded up – why not).

You could easily save each person one whole hour a week, that’s 52 hours a saved a year – per person. Now depending on what users are paid, this could be anything from £453.44 per user on the national living wage to tens of millions if use by C-Suite executives.

Now I’m sure you’ll agree, that any single idea that can save a business this amount of money is a pretty good one, so what could it possibly be?

It’s actually not a new idea, and it’s being able to ‘bookmark favourite views’.

The problem that we were trying to solve is that our customers whilst using our system create in a short space of time a HUGE amount of data. Each contact, note, stock item, contract, message, report and job is available 24/7 on our cloud-based system.

Users with the right roles and restrictions can access that information, and apply filters based on their task at that given moment.

Let’s take a common task around jobs. A user in the bookings team might have a daily task of looking at the jobs that were carried out yesterday but weren’t complete due to a problem.

Going to the schedule, list view, applying two date filters might not seem like a big task, and after doing it a few times, you do get quite fast at it, but there are still a lot of clicks there, where there could be less.

That same user then might need to look at all the jobs which were completed yesterday by another group of resources for them to sample for audit purposes, that’s another set of filters to be applied.

You get the idea.

The solution to us being able to save this time is bookmarking these favourite views, so rather than having select all those options, you do it once, and save. The view can be accessed and applied from anywhere in the system.

What about dates I hear you say – in your example, you said the workflow involved ‘yesterdays jobs’ – how does that work? Really simple, for date filters you can use dates relative to today. For example, yesterday’s jobs would be saved as ‘current day minus one day’.

Favourite views are simply amazing and save users so much time. Within 3 hours of releasing this feature internally, my colleagues between them had created over 100, and I cant wait to see how many our customers make!

If you want to see it in action, you can do as we made a video to show it off: