We are in the process of launching a cloud based solution that will help small businesses, departments/groups and freelancers to manage their customers, employees and projects.<p>I need help from the community to give feedback on application functionality/usability and user interface. Any form of guidance and suggestion (as well as criticism) will be greatly appreciated.<p>What problem are we trying to solve?
Having worked with several small and medium sized business, we’ve seen that they do not have IT/technical resources (and budget, of course) to deploy tools and solutions that automates data management of customers, employees and related interactions. We are trying to solve this problem by providing cloud application that will give necessary functionality to businesses, all integrated with each other and will not require any IT/technical resources to maintain it.<p>Currently, the functionality includes customer management, customer support/portal, project management, employee management and business collaboration using twitter/yammer style messaging as well as document sharing.<p>We’ve setup a demo account that can be used for login to the application (or you could create your own beta account at http://www.appsoncloud.com).<p>Demo application URL: http://bit.ly/doMilQ<p>You can use any user name/password combination from below list:<p>1. demo/demo - Employee login<p>2. demo1/demo1 - Employee login<p>3. demo2/demo2 - Employee login<p>4. demo@client.com/demo - Customer login (to access support portal)
1. On the authentication screen, white text is displayed over a light gray background which makes for very bed legibility.<p>2. Can some of the sidebar widgets be collapsed or even removed to help reduce overall noise?<p>3. I'd suggest moving the "Activity Update" panel above the "Tasks" panel, just under the user's name and profile photo, since updating status is presumably the primary goal for most users.<p>4. The "Edit Profile" button below the primary navigation could be removed and replaced with a hover invitation link next to the user's name or perhaps by clicking the profile photo, further reducing the number of elements competing for attention. On a related note, could "My Tasks" be removed since it is already displayed prominently in the main content area?<p>5. On "Case" pages, the actions displayed below the primary navigation are difficult to visually scan and parse. This is compounded by the fact that unrelated buttons share colors, making it difficult for the user to create a mental model and anticipate expected behavior. A dropdown menu of options might be more appropriate to show all available actions in this case, and would further reduce overall noise.<p>6. There is another usability issue to consider with the buttons placed directly below the primary navigation bar. If I run the cursor too close to the top of the target area for the buttons, I can easily trigger a dropdown hover from one of the primary navigation menu items above it. That could get frustrating in everyday use.<p>Have you done any structured usability or task completion testing with real users yet? Check out Steve Krug's book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" for some ideas there. You could also gain a lot of inexpensive insight using services like feedbackarmy.com, userfly.com or loop11.com. Hope that helps.
Lots to test, so I'll just give my initial impressions after a brief look:<p>- Red "Required" error text after submitting an incomplete form frequently overlaps <input> descriptors<p>- Seems like secondary main nav li items should be indented and have text-decoration:none<p>- I might like to see Projects and Customers/Support segregated somehow from Employees. Ordering in the main nav doesn't seem to reflect priority.<p>- Important secondary nav buttons are sometimes grey, sometimes blue. ie- "New Task" @ Home > My Tasks
Pie charts should be larger - Activities list should be shorter - Recent timesheet hours should scroll - Maybe some subtle background graphics. Everything is a little too small and a little too busy. Hope that helps.