As we prepare for the public launch of Touchpoint Toolkit we’re also taking a moment to improve some interfaces that have been neglected. It was pretty obvious that we needed to work on a reorganization of Settings while at the same time updating the look and feel. We’ve been looking for an opportunity to revamp Settings so this became the perfect opportunity.

So what’s changed?

New tab arrangement

You’ll notice a completely new set of tabs running across the top:

 

We’ve divided settings into five basic categories:

• General
• Web portal
• Widgets
• Mobile
• Integrations

General is where settings live that impact our entire suite of tools, while Web portal, Widgets, and Mobile contain settings for the three major ways of doing feedback and support with our product. Integrations has settings for the other types of integrations with our product (Service Hooks, Gadgets, our API, and more).

Nested Settings

Another thing that’s changed with this update is that we now have the ability to nest settings several layers deep. This gives us the ability to surface the important settings while giving access other settings with a few clicks. Here’s an example from the General tab:

As you get deeper into settings a breadcrumb appears that aids in helping you navigate upwards. Below you can see a Tickets breadcrumb which can be used to get back to the Tickets page.

URLs

URLs for settings have also been improved. On browsers that support pushState you will now see URLs like:

http://yoursubdomain.uservoice.com/admin/settings/general

Instead of:

http://yoursubdomain.uservoice.com/admin/settings#/general 

These “Hashless” URLs will work even through redirection. So if you paste a settings URL to a colleague that is not logged in to UserVoice they will see the sign in screen and then be redirected to the appropriate setting.

Another benefit in using a more nested structure is that we now have very specific URLs for sections. For instance, to edit ticket rules you can now go to:

http://yoursubdomain.uservoice.com/admin/settings/tickets/rules

This means we’ll be able to provide much more useful links in our knowledge base and while giving you support!

My profile

We’ve also moved the “My profile” section into settings. It used to live under a more generic user profile section of the site, but makes more sense here. We updated the design a bit, too:

My notifications

Like My profile it made sense to move notifications into settings as well. Here it is with an updated design:

Agents and permissions

One consequence of changing the structure of our tabs is that we’ve had to find new homes for those settings. The Admins tab has become a subsection of the General tab. We’ve also renamed it “Agents and permissions” as that reflects our current thinking a little better:

Logs

Like the Admins tab, we’ve also had to find a new home for site logs. It’s now a subsection of the Web portal tab and called SSO logs as it’s related more to Single Sign-On than anything else:

New Touchpoint builder

Front and center on the new Widgets tab is the new Touchpoint Toolkit builder. Of course this will only show up for people who are part of the Touchpoint beta program for now, but this will eventually be what all customers use to get started with Touchpoint:

Flatter design for header and navigation

Included in this update is a new flatter design for the navigation and header. There are a lot less shadows and gradients. This is part of our effort to continue to update the admin console to reflect current design trends:

For those of you on Retina displays you’ll also notice that most of the graphics in the header and sidebar are now Retina-friendly:

Settings removed from sidebar

One final thing. We’ve officially removed settings from the sidebar. It will now only be accessible from the header. To help folks with this and to announce the other changes, we will be rolling this out with the following notification:

That wraps up the highlights of this update. There are lots of little changes that are not reflected here, but these are the major ones. We have plans for making Settings even easier to use, but those are long term goals and we want to get these changes pushed out as soon as possible.

We’ll be rolling these changes out to you this week. While we think there are a lot of improvements here we know that no design is perfect! If you find any bugs or frustrating/confusing experiences, please drop us a line so we can take a look!

Enjoy,

-John W. Long
Designer, UserVoice

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Disk image courtesy of Uwe Hermann