SmarterTrack 13.1 is going to be released soon and we wanted to to notify customers of a difficult decision we made relating to the 13.1 release.

The horizontal view using the bottom preview pane has been removed as it was being used by less than 5% of customers. There are other reasons for this change, of course, such as substantially less code to manage, a reduction in redundancy, better focus on implementing a single view for all information, the ability to carry that view to the mobile interface and more, some of which are discussed below.

Based on the utilization stats provided above, customers already realize how the vertical view better displays the large amount of general information related to tickets, live chats, Who’s On, etc. In addition, when custom fields and external providers are used, even more information needs to be displayed. Then there is the level of customization available to agents: agents have the ability to change the “visible fields” that are displayed for both tickets and live chats. That means they can pick and choose what information they want to see for each area, which also means that these views can differ from agent to agent.  
 

Having both vertical and horizontal displays means we have to support essentially 2 completely different interfaces for SmarterTrack, which means 2 different code bases. This is not only difficult to manage but it can lead to inconsistencies in how information is displayed, especially when you factor in variety of resolutions on the desktop, various mobile devices and the variety of different browsers customers use across both. And, as we add more and more communication channels into SmarterTrack, having a single, consistent interface to use for displaying information means less chance of information being lost or unavailable to agents and managers.

Overall, this will allow us to improve the usability of SmarterTrack and at a much faster pace! It is our intention to give customers the best possible experience and sometimes that requires us to make difficult decisions, decisions we do not take lightly.

Some customers might ask “Why does SmarterMail still have a horizontal view?” SmarterMail has significantly less information to display than SmarterTrack plus it’s static information across all users. That said, even in SmarterMail, there is very low utilization of the horizontal view.

I hope this helps explain the decision as we wanted to let customers know about the change before the release. I’m sure the people who use this setting will have concerns. We hope our explanation helps and we will continue the discussion as needed.