New in Highrise: A redesigned "stream"

January 29 2010, 5:50am

In Highrise we call the long list of notes, comments, and emails on the Dashboard, a person's page, a company's page, a case's page, and a deal's page "the stream."

Today we announce that we've cleaned up the stream.

The look of the stream has never felt quite right to us. It's been fine, and it certainly worked well enough, but there have been parts of it that weren't as clear as they should have been. And some parts were downright messy and confusing.

For example this is how the start of an email that is attached to a case looked before the update:

Three separate links, all the content and links were the same color, it's hard to know what to click and which link takes you where. It's a mess.

The new design looks like this:

The date is black and bold like before, but the other data is treated more like a traditional email header in an email application. Each main point gets its own line. It's smaller and a different size/color than the content below. You know where the data ends and the content begins. There's only one key link on the left side above the content.

A clear "go to" link

Now we also have a clear "Go to email" (or "Go to note") link in the same exact place for every item. It lives in the top right corner of every email/note. Before it was in a different place depending on if it was a note, comment, or email. That was confusing.

Easier to read

We also adjusted the typography. The slightly larger font size and slightly taller line spacing makes notes and emails easier to read. They take up slightly more vertical space but improved legibility makes it worth it.

Clearer separation and containment

We also encased each note, comment, or email in a light grey border (the border will be round in Firefox and Safari, square in IE). This helps to set each item off from one another. And it'll make even more sense down the road when we release some other updates we have planned for notes, comments, and emails.

Here's what a few notes look like stacked up:

This is much clearer than before. We think once you get used to it you're really going to like it. We've been looking at it for a while and are really pleased with the changes.

There are a variety of other subtle tweaks sprinkled into this redesign, but we wanted to share the major ones with you in this announcement. You'll discover the other ones along the way.

This update is live in your account today. So dig around and check it out. You'll see the updates on your Dashboard, people pages, company names, deal pages, and case pages.

Thanks again for using Highrise!

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