Too Many Alerts!

We've released a new feature today in order to solve the "flow" problem that some therapists have been having with the home page.  Everyone already know that when you're on your home page, you see a list of appointments that are in the past and need to be documented off to the right.  These alerts are there to remind you what still needs to be done, and they look like this:

We were proud of this idea when it was first deployed, but some therapists have been wanting more.  This email came to me yesterday from Marisa Pennington (St. Louis Public Schools):


"I really like the improvements that you have made to the therapylog 2.0. I do have some suggestions. When documenting the appointments on the calendar, the computer automatically returns to the home page. I think it would be helpful that after you document one session, it immediately returns to the calendar page on the date you are looking at. Right now, it returns to the homepage, and then I have to click on the calendar, click on the day, then click on the time. Only to have to go through all this again when I move to the next students. Even when I click on the name from the homepage (the following events need to be documented), it still returns home after that event has been documented. Then I have to click on the next group, bring up the calendar, and then document. I think it would flow much easier if we could move to the next session/students automatically without having to return to the homepage. I have used some programs with a wizard that allows you to move forward and/or backwards to document an event. Also, I think it would be helpful if we can see more of the events that need to be documented on the homepage. Or at least an option to "view all." Right now, if I want to document an event that is past the ones allowed on the screen, I have to go to the calendar to view the event. These are just some suggestions and feedback. I think that it would make things flow a lot easier and take out some unnecessary steps. Thanks."

There are some good points there. Most importantly, that the flow for documenting appointments that were too far down the list to see was a little too long, since the user had to click back through the calendar every time.  However, we didn't want to go with having the documentation page redirect back to the calendar because it might be that the user would not want to be documenting in date order but rather by all the appointments for one student or one group, etc.  As I thought about these concerns, and the suggestion that Marisa gave for a "view all" option, a new plan came together that is now live on the website.  The first part is the new "View All" link that is available when you have more than 10 alerts on your homepage:

When you click that link, you're taken to a different page that shows you up to 150 alerts at a time, more than most people will ever have in their backlog.  That page looks like this:

The important thing about this is that if you use the "View all" page to document from, than when you finish documenting an appointment it will take you right back to this page rather than to the homepage, so that you don't have to click through the calendar every time when documenting more recent appointments.

Thanks for the feedback Marisa! And to anyone else out there who has an idea, let us know!  We're always willing to try to work with you to make your work easier.  Just leave us a comment, and you could be the one to give us the idea for our next improvement!

~Ethan