User Interface Updates
Blog post
·
3 Jul, 2012
We’re happy to announce a number of interface updates to PocketSmith that should improve your experience overall. We focused on:
- Improving the widgets, and applying them consistently throughout the application
- Tidier Bank Statements and Merchants pages
- Increasing usability through better form design
- Bringing some of the more important information to the fore, and hiding non-essential elements
- Improving the slideouts
There are many other little changes too, but we’ll leave you to find them! These are the key ones to take note of.
Contents
- 1 Better widgets
- 2 Better slideouts
- 3 Improved New/Edit Event Window
- 4 Tidier Bank Statements and Merchants pages
- 5 Date slider controls in Bank Statements page
- 6 More evocative Goals
- 7 Where to from here?
The widgets have been redesigned to make better use of space, and best of all, it’s much simpler now to edit items within the widget.
Hover your mouse over the cog to access the widget’s menu. Clicking an option will trigger a slideout with the relevant form.
Notice the new ‘Scheduled balance’ indicator. This helps you quickly see how much you’re scheduled to have today. You may click this to edit today’s balance across all your calendars - which is similar to clicking on the balance at the bottom of a calendar day. This indicator displays your actual balances when viewing the calendar in Transactions mode, or when you are on the Bank Statements page.
Better slideouts
The slideouts have also been redesigned be more consistent in size and less visually clunky. They now appear from the edge of the screen rather than from the calling widget, and are more generous in terms of space. This sets the stage for more improvements to come in this area. Remember that you may hit the ‘Escape’ key at any point to close slideouts and modal windows.
The new slideouts are simpler in design, and offer more room to breathe.
Improved New/Edit Event Window
The overall window size is bigger, which is a step up from the slightly cramped environment in the previous version. Form fields have been grouped into fieldsets for better accessibility. The title and amount fields are also a bit larger.
Creating/editing an event is now a bit more interactive. As you enter the event’s details and choose a colour, the window title bar mirrors what the event will look like in the calendar.
Best of all, you will be alerted to the more prominent ‘apply settings to’ options (“Only this event / All events from start / This event and all future events”) once you begin editing, which means fewer mistakes when editing a series of repeating events!
The new event window is better organised, more interactive, and alerts you to changes in a series.
Tidier Bank Statements and Merchants pages
We have also brought the widgets to Bank Statements and Merchants, which means:
- Clutter is removed from the top of the screen
- You may now show/hide accounts from view using the same widgets/checkbox metaphor
- The cumulative balance of active accounts is prominently displayed on the top left
The updated Bank Statements view: less clutter, better accessibility.
Date slider controls in Bank Statements page
We have brought this over from the Cashflows page, as it’s a quicker way to filter your transactions by date, as opposed to using a date-picker. Just click on the date at the top of the table to bring it up. Click on the date again to hide it.
The date slider lets you filter your transactions by date much quicker than before.
More evocative Goals
As the first of a planned series of updates for the Goals feature, we’re letting you personalise your goals a bit more by uploading larger images for display. This should make Goals a bit more fun to look at and aspire to :-)
This area is a work in progress, and we look forward to making more improvements on it in the coming months.
Upload an image that best depicts your goal, look at it often, and relish that feeling as you get closer!
Where to from here?
These updates have been in the works for the past couple of months, and we’re very pleased to be able to finally release them. We’ve got a vast number of things to be getting on with from here, and the top of the list is allowing pending transactions in the bank feed service (see here: [About “Pending” transactions][7]), which we expect will be live in the next couple of days.
After this, we’re going to progress onwards with our development roadmap. As always, we welcome your comments and questions - please [get in touch][8] with your thoughts!
[7]: http://psmth.to/pending-tx (About “Pending” transactions)
[8]: http://www.pocketsmith.com/about#contact (Get in touch)
