Built on Collaboration

Hi readers, this is my first post on this blog, so let me know what you think and what you'd like to hear more of. I'm the product manager at Aconex so tend to split my time between talking to clients about the needs they have around managing information on their projects, and talking to our tech guys to see if we can make it happen.

Something I came to realise pretty quickly in this role is that in terms of the development of collaboration technology, it's not always about the ground-breaking new modules that revolutionize industry practice; sometimes it's the smaller 'widgets' that can really make a difference and just make life easier for people on their projects.

A good example of this is a new bit of functionality we added onto Aconex today that improves how you view and search for Attributes. Attributes are the meta data fields, usually relating to a works package, area or phase of the project, that can be attached to documents and mails so that they are easier to retrieve. The new functionality rapidly filters the list of attributes available for selection when running a search or creating a new mail or document.

This new feature was added because a client of ours involved in large-scale engineering projects came to us recently looking for a solution to an issue that many of their staff faced many times a day.

Because of the scale of their projects, they have hundreds of options in the Attributes fields - I think the figure was about 280 in total - and trying to find and select one from these long, drop-down lists was very frustrating.

When we did some research into some other projects on our system, we found that this client was by no means alone...

• 122 of our projects had an Attributes list size (in the Mail or Documents module) in excess of 100 long
• 22 projects had an attributes list in excess of 200
• 4 projects had a list in excess of 300 attributes (ouch!)

Having set up a dummy project with 300 attributes to test it for ourselves, it was immediately obvious how frustrating it is to scroll down and scan through a list of 100s of options (which all look pretty similar) to find the one you want and select it.

The solution our guys came up with - an auto complete text box at the top of the Attributes list - should make things much easier. It's a simple, fast and intuitive approach that instantly shortens the list of options based on the filter criteria you enter. So, for example, if you're looking for an attribute containing the word 'Cement' from a list of 150 possible options, you start typing "Cem" and the list will immediately shrink to only display the attributes containing those letters. Sure beats scrolling down a list of 150 trying to find the one you need.

If a simple tool or widget like this has made life easier in an application you use regularly, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Labels: Technology