Hey Quickbase Community!
It's been far too long! Seems like Empower was a year ago and also just last week.
Hopefully, over the past few months you've kept safe and continued to drive your businesses with great custom applications built on Quickbase. I've been lucky enough to connect with a few of you and am blown away by how you've used our platform to help your businesses adapt to all of the new challenges we're now facing.
I may be a new face to some, so for those who don't know me, I'm Ryan Murray and I am a Product Owner here at Quickbase. I've worked here since 2014 when I joined the Care team, and then spent the next four years on our Business Enablement team where I built and managed the Quickbase apps that helped run Quickbase. Now, I have the pleasure of working with a bunch of super smart folks updating the Quickbase UI.
As a refresher, earlier this year we announced that we would be incrementally modernizing the Quickbase UI over the next few years. The goal in 2020 was to prepare us for future support of international characters and accessibility, and speed up our delivery of new features in the long term. We're just now starting to see those investments pay off.
I wanted to give an update on the next phase of our New Dashboards. I couldn't be more excited to finally kick off a beta program for our customers. We've been running a small pilot over the last few months that has given us a great foothold on some improvements we can make before releasing to a wider audience.
Now that we've addressed some of those issues, it's time to ride the next wave.
About New Dashboards
As this year has proven, business conditions and job functions can change rapidly. Organizations need operational agility—the ability to flex and adapt business processes—in order to keep up with the pace of these changes and navigate the challenges of today.
One of the keys to operational agility is the ability to make decisions quickly. In order to do that you need to have accurate data you can be confident in, tailored to the decision you're trying to make.
Our New Dashboards, representing the next major milestone in our UI Refresh, are built with these needs in mind. We can't wait to give you a better way to gather real-time insights from your operational data by providing more modern visualizations and new tools to interact with your data.
We know that most of our customers use more than one application every day to manage their unique processes. New dashboards will allow you to display reports from any app in your account side by side, consolidating important data for your end users and ensuring that you're able to get the right data to the right people at the right time.
Now, even if we created the ultimate dashboard building experience (and I think we'll get there), you'd only be able to go so far with our current charting capability. So we felt it was as important to upgrade the experience in this area of the platform. In addition to an upgraded look and feel, updating our charts also gives us a foundation to innovate upon and provide you with new reporting capabilities more easily.
We decided to focus first on the aesthetics of four of our most commonly used charts—bar, line, pie, and scatter. We're introducing some new patterns in these charts that you'll see carry over to other types as they are released.
Here's a quick preview of what's coming.
New tool tips
We've made it easier to see values of all categories at a glance when you're summarizing more than one datapoint or segmenting your data with a chart series.
Making it easier to view complex reports
In the past it was difficult to determine which line corresponded to what axis. We've made improvements to our line charts that will allow you to more easily leverage multi-axis reporting.
Zoom zoom
You’ll have new ways to gain insight from your relational charts by zooming in for greater detail.
You'll see improvements like this rolled out to all charts incrementally. Keep an eye on our release notes for updates on the charts we'll refresh and the new features we’ll release to make Quickbase reporting even more powerful. These new charts will be on the dashboard, when the feature is activated.
What still needs some work
The dashboard is very much in beta. Fair warning to those of you who'd like to participate, you will find bugs, there will be quirks, and it may not do everything you need it to just yet. We're still actively developing the feature and need your input on the big rocks you'd like us to take on next.
A lot of thought and effort has gone into making the dashboard canvas a delightful experience. While it has improved dramatically over the last few months, we still have a lot of work to do. Being able to more granularly lay out reports and widgets on the dashboard has been a highly requested feature, and we're excited to show you our first pass. We're really looking forward to your feedback as you put it through its paces.
In the first wave of beta, we'll focus on charting use cases. We'll support Bar, Pie, Line, Scatter and Gauge charts. Over the next several months we'll bring more chart types to the dashboard and will cap it off with allowing you to add tabular data like Table and Summary reports on our way to GA.
There are many more items that I didn't mention above that the teams have been working on. Below you'll see a rough outline of where we're heading.
How you can help
Over the next several months, we'll be accepting new customers and partners into the program in waves. To get involved, follow the instructions in our December release notes. We're very excited to get new dashboards in the hands of more builders and their end users who are willing to collaborate with us and provide feedback. If you're not ready yet, that's OK too, we'd still love your feedback. Feel free to post here or message me directly on the Community Slack.
Hope to talk to you soon!
Ryan
