Better Tools for Managing Conversations

We know that one of the reasons many clients use GetThru is because they find it easy to use. But ease of use does not come easy: it requires thinking hard about User Experience (UX) and listening intently to customer feedback.

Earlier this year, we rolled out some major UX changes to the conversations tab of ThruText, where many clients spend a lot of time, especially those who use P2P texting for organizing. We got a lot of feedback about how our new design could be improved (h/t especially to our partners at NextGen and National Nurses United). In retrospect, we should have done a better job consulting our users before making the initial round changes. But once we got the feedback, we set to work on a variety of improvements as detailed below.

Primary Changes

• Added Needs Reply statistic to the Conversations List – So admins can see how many of a given sender’s conversations need a reply, which may be a clue that they need a reminder to finish their assignment.  
  

• ‍Added the Needs reply statistic to the Senders pulldown – We also fixed some issues with the sort order not persisting when toggling between senders.
  

• Added the ability to reassign from the Conversations List – Now you don’t have to click into a sender’s conversations in order to reassign them.
  

• Made the Conversations List sortable – so admins can look at senders based on their total messages or how many Need Reply, as opposed to just alphabetically.
  

• Added a Next Sender button – to make it easier to click through senders when an admin is doing “quality control” work.
  

• Added a “this contact has been opted out” notation – to make it easier to see whether a contact has been opted out.
  

Additional Changes

• Created more white space in the interface – so that admins can see more of the conversation at once without having to scroll.  ‍
• Made the page load faster – by asynchronously loading computational-heavy statistics (like Needs Reply).
• ‍Made it possible to (again) see the phone number of a given recipient – for times when a specific conversation needs to be flagged for follow-up.
• ‍Fixed several bugs – where searches (of replies or senders) and the changing of opt-in status did not clear/update without a reset  

We hope these changes make a difference for any admin spending time in our Conversations Tab. If you’re a GetThru user with other ideas of how we can improve, please let us know via our annual Client Satisfaction Survey!