Activity timeline redesign

A core concept in Close is that each lead has an “Activity Timeline” which shows—in one place—all the activity pertaining to a specific lead: all phone calls, emails, notes, and when it was created.

It’s super useful to see all your organization’s contact with a specific contact/lead/company in one place, but we found that on more active leads the timeline could get pretty hard to visually parse (and slow to load) after a while.

A couple weeks ago we made leads load much faster by only loading the most recent 25 activities by default, and loading additional batches in as you scroll down the page.

We’ve also just redesigned parts of the activity timeline with the following goals in mind:

• Make it easier to understand at a quick glance the communication history with a lead, and visually separate different activity types.
• Allow filtering by different “types” of activities, for when you just want to find those call notes from 4 months ago without having to see all the emails in the meantime.
• Allow filtering by “my activity” if I only care about seeing my own communication with a lead.
• The ability to “collapse” really unimportant timeline events, like a missed call, without getting rid of them completely.
• An overall better visual representation of the timeline.

Here’s an old view of the timeline:

and here’s the new version:

You’ll notice a few things:

• Each activity has a color (with a larger icon) so you can quickly get a feel for the types of communication that has been happening on a lead. If there’s a long string of emails after 2 phone calls, you’ll be able to see that more easily.
• You can now filter by activity-type (or “Mine”). The colored icons also make it obvious when this feature is in-use.
• The tiny green dot represents a “collapsed” activity. You can hover over it to see what it means (screenshot below) but so far we only collapse really unimportant calls: outgoing calls under 45 seconds in duration, with no notes, 12 hours ago or longer. (By collapsing unimportant activity it helps your important activity stand out more.)
• We no longer have the “New Note” textbox open by default. Notes aren’t used as often as calls or emails and it was an inconsistent UI before. You can quickly open a New Note by keyboard shortcut now: cmd+shift+O on Mac or ctrl+shift+O on Windows.
• We also unified our icons and are more consistent everywhere. We’re using Glyphicons almost everywhere now and have a nice visual framework for being able to add crisp Retina-friendly icons for future activity types.

Another big step—email threading—is also coming soon, which will also help clean up your timelines!

Let us know what you think @philfreo and @closeio

—Phil Freo