New Year, New Changes for Signal

It’s only 12 days into 2012 and Signal customers are already seeing some exciting changes to the application. We started early this year on our spring cleaning by attacking some core usability issues within Signal, and while these efforts may seem small at first blush, the care and attention to detail in fixing them was significant. Here’s what to look for:

Our new Email, and Text Message Overview pages highlight recent campaign success

The “All Message” views for email and text have seen some exciting improvements to make them more useful.  For starters, we added a consistent view across both channels so now you can easily access your Sent, Scheduled, Draft, and Pending messages in a uniform way across both channels. We’ve also teased out some high level statistics about your recent campaigns, such as recipients, clicks, and opens in the summary view so that you can easily compare recent campaigns. Here’s what else we fixed…

Regarding Email:

• Users couldn’t copy an email from this navigation, and in order to complete this, they had to navigate to a separate location (lists > messages).
• Users would be dropped here after saving an email as a draft, and this view did not have a tab for drafts, leading to confusion.
• Messages were not sortable by any attribute other than time of send

And the problems we fixed regarding our Text Message Overview:

• The “recent” messages tab would also show future scheduled messages, leading to user confusion, and “future” was an ill-suited description for scheduled messages.
• Users could not get to our new campaign message stats from the text messages table.
• When a text message is scheduled it’s status can be pending for up to a minute, and because we dropped users in the “recent messages” view which did not contain pending messages, users at times felt their message magically disappeared on them.
• Again, messages were not sortable.

We’ve revised the Contact Upload with Easy Attribute Creation

Previously we did not allow our users to create attributes on the fly when they were uploading their contacts to Signal.  Over time this turned out to be contradictory to our vision. Our previous process assumed people would define their custom attributes prior to adding subscribers to our system while our application stressed that uploading subscribers should be the first step. In a nutshell, it was a reverse flow, that rarely led people towards importing their useful, custom data. In fact, only 32% of customers had taken advantage of this great capability.

By removing the need to navigate away from the contact upload to create attributes, we reduced the steps required for the user, and bundled the entire process into one workflow. Signal users can now create attributes on the fly, save them, and map them to their subscriber data.

We’ve added inline image support for Web Coupons

Just as we added the ability for our users to simply add images to their email campaigns, we’ve also just added the ability for people to add images to their Signal coupons.  This is just one of many improvements we plan to make to our Coupon Promotion tool over the next several weeks.

We’re confident that each of these UI enhancements will help add up to a greater experience using Signal. As always, feel free to contact us as support@signalhq.com with any questions, comments, or concerns.