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How Revamping One Tiny Feature Massively Improved our Product

Through casual conversations with customers and watching users interact with Binocs, one thing became very clear recently: We could make major improvements on the way users add extra (user configurable) information to Binocs objects. We dug in deeper. We asked a lot of questions. We listened a lot. And the picture came into focus. Although it was already possible to add extra information via tags, the use of it wasn’t intuitive and simple enough. We have multiple goals for tags:

  • add extra contextual information to demand, services, etc
  • add extra dimensions for root-cause analysis on planning issues
  • monitor other metrics than workload, such as cost elements
  • establish integrations with other systems

In essence tags are user configurable fields that can be added to any object in Binocs (demand, service, service activity, team member and equipment). So, armed with this insight, we completely redesigned the way users use and see tags. In the new version tags look like any other Binocs field and act like any other Binocs field. Administrators define which custom fields (called tag types) can be added for a certain Binocs object. Users can then add these fields (called tags) and fill in their value. Off course, in the process, we added some extra possibilities such as dropdown lists, numeric and hidden tags. In the following two short tutorial videos I explain the use of tags in more detail.

How to use tags in Binocs

With the newly designed approach, we fully support each of the business goals and do it in a better and more intuitive way than before.