Don’t make people start over

From a dashboard I designed for wholesale sales reps, who take retailers’ orders for manufacturers, and the agencies they work for.

You’re on the phone with customer support about a delivery that never arrived. You’ve explained the problem, read out the order number, and been transferred to the person who can fix it, and they ask you to explain everything again. Apparently the call was easier to transfer than the conversation. You don’t mind who fixes it; you’d just like the last twenty minutes to count. Software does the same thing when a handoff from one tool to another leaves behind what you’d already worked out.

I used to think that once people spotted a problem, they should be able to fix it on the spot. Research changed my mind: between noticing a problem and fixing it there’s usually triage, working out whether it matters and what to do, and that was the step the ordering platform lacked. So the dashboard was built for triage, and fixing could stay where it already worked, in the platform’s order screens.

Keeping editing out also avoided a problem I was worried about. Once a tool can change one thing about an order, people expect it to change everything the platform can, and a dashboard that edited would have become a partial copy of the platform’s order screens. Leaving fixing in those screens made the move from the dashboard into them the part to get right.

Anywhere the dashboard showed an order, a short menu on it offered two kinds of next step. One looked further on the dashboard, such as the products in that order or that retailer’s other orders; the other opened the order in the platform’s own screens, in a new browser tab. Before the dashboard, opening a related record, like an order’s retailer or the products on it, meant losing the one in front of you, so people kept a browser window open for each kind of data, set up by hand. On the dashboard, the orders, retailers, and products behind a finding showed up in its own tables, and opening an order in the platform left the dashboard where it was.

In one research session, a rep’s count of held-up orders, the ones sitting in a status like pending, was higher than it had been on Monday. The orders behind it showed most of them belonged to one retailer, with deliveries due the following week. The rep opened each order in the platform, dealt with it, and closed its tab. Between orders, the dashboard’s list was still there, sorted with the closest deliveries at the top, and when the rep refreshed it, each order they’d dealt with showed its new status in the same sorted list.

After release, reps in research sessions worked with two tabs, the dashboard and the order in front of them, instead of the four or five windows we’d watched them juggle before. The dashboard stayed in reach rather than in view, so people had to switch back to it to consult the list. The cost was worth it, because opening orders in the platform let people correct them in screens they already knew.

When I test a handoff, I don’t start from a fresh record. I start partway through a real task, with a list or comparison already built, follow the link, make the change, and come back to see whether the list is where I left it, with the change showing. A handoff is finished when the person arrives at the next tool with everything they learned still in reach, not when a link opens the right record.

Related: Use the calendar people actually work byUse the calendar people actually work byA long-time member of our monthly council of agency owners and reps once asked me why the dashboard had no way to save a date range of her own alongside the built-in ones.Part 1 of 7 in People Log In with a Question, on finding the need behind a request.