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Household/Individual 2.0 - more than just a pretty face!

Last night we released a very significant project that will impact everyone who uses Fellowship One; a total replacement for the Household/Individual detail pages. Accounting for over 35% of our web traffic, nearly 100% of our users access these pages in the course of a normal day. While the exposure of this project makes it significant, the underlying architecture is equally as important and is the aspect of product development that can be, but shouldn't be, overlooked.

 

It is always obvious when screen design changes, what is not so obvious are the scaffolding and foundation changes that must be considered. This is an area that is easily ignored when software development is rushed, on a tight budget, or farmed out since the end user doesn't see or typically understand what this is; in the end this will determine how easy it is to make improvements, support, and extend the functionality. We did not short cut this step! A significant effort was put into a solid foundation that will help us continue to build upon, reduce errors and support what you see. Database calls and render times were tested and re-tested to work toward an optimum performance; this was very important since we are displaying so much on one screen. The scaffolding was built in a way that will allow us to extend abilities to 3rd party vendors so they can begin building external solutions while keeping Fellowship One as the database of record. In short, the changes you see today are much more than just a pretty face; they represent a starting place for a big future.

 

As always, we hope you appreciate and enjoy the changes that were made.

Reminder: if you had been following the design conversations we had 5-6 months ago, you will undoubtedly notice that there are some things we have further improved upon, but also some aspects that are missing; this is an iterative process and you can expect improvements to come.Please be patient and make sure you let us know what you would like to see by submitting your ideas on the IDEAS tab above.

 

Check out the EDUCATION tab above for more information and direction to learning opportunities available.

Published Monday, January 19, 2009 5:54 PM by CurtisHarris

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kdorado said:

So far I love it!! And thank you for doing the work to make it a solid foundation - I'm looking forward to some of those third-party vendors.

January 21, 2009 11:38 AM
 

Amy Yost said:

Great!  Is there anyway we can default the INVOLVEMENT portion to be closed.  It takes up so much of the page and it isn't typically the most important thing we want to know about a person.  

Thanks!

January 21, 2009 11:59 AM
 

ljones said:

Love it!  So much easier to navigate and I am especially excited to be able to see if the person is a member of a group!

January 21, 2009 2:16 PM
 

rguilliams said:

Nice. But improvements to reporting would have been much nicer.

January 22, 2009 9:21 AM
 

Andrea Leslie said:

So far I'm loving it!!

January 22, 2009 11:50 AM
 

AYost said:

Is there any way to make the INVOLVEMENT information be attendance instead of assignment?  It is confusing to see things in the future as involvement when they may never actually fulfil their assignment.

January 22, 2009 1:05 PM
 

CurtisHarris said:

I've heard the argument that future assignments are a great way to understand a deeper commitment to involvement; if the individual shows a lack of attendance history, but has volunteer/participant assignments doesn't that say something?  You tell me.

January 22, 2009 1:37 PM
 

CurtisHarris said:

@rguilliams I hear ya'.  We are working on reporting full time, it is an entirely different team that is driving that effort.

January 22, 2009 1:39 PM
 

CurtisHarris said:

@amyyost we will have a follow up release in the next couple months that will allow you to set your expand/collapse preferences for each section.

January 22, 2009 1:41 PM
 

jhallford said:

Curtis - the new view is great. Thanks for all of your hard work. We know F1 is a work in progress, and we appreciate you and your team's drive toward excellence.

January 22, 2009 3:11 PM
 

Tamy Sabo said:

Absolutely love it! Looking forward to continuing improvements!  Thanks FT!  You guys rock!

January 22, 2009 8:57 PM
 

Kim Ludwick said:

So, out of curiosity, for everyone who has posted that they love the new changes, are you saying this from the perspective of someone who is going in and looking up information? Or, are you in Fellowship entering brand new people into your database.

Unfortunately I am NOT feeling all the excitement that you all are and I know that my data entry person is not happy with it either so far. It has taken her more time to enter all her weekend stuff then it has since she very first started in this position.

I am hoping that maybe if we go back and watch the video again and spend more time using it that we will begin to feel the same way you do.

As I have been working today I actually have a list started of things that are somewhat confusing and some things that I feel like we lost in the new change, my plan was to send my questions to Fellowship. I don't know if its just a matter of needing more time with the changes or what but this has been an extremely frustrating day of data entry and general work in Fellowship. Below are some of the things that I am wondering about.

1. When entering dates are we going to get back the ability to simply type "T" and get today's date?

2. I find the new way of entering the attributes, assignments etc... is more time consuming because we are having to scroll through a much longer list. Seems to me it would be simpler to still give us the option to first filter by the group first, this way we don't have to scroll through more info then we need to.

3. We really don't like the new way of choosing the different contact items within the form when creating a new contact. Maybe we are missing a step, if so PLEASE let us know. In the original format I created a form and set up all the possible options as check boxes, so in a matter of no time we could go through the form and record everything with a simple click, attributes, interest, assignments etc... Now everything is in drop down form so we have to go through and do each item individually, extremely time consuming compared to our other method.

4. ADDRESSES: I have found that if someone's address has been flagged as invalid the address is no longer visible on the right hand side which I guess is fine, it indicates either a bad address or no address at all. What I don't like is that as soon as an address gets flagged as invalid you lose the "edit" feature also on the right hand side under the address portion.

After spending over five minutes trying to figure out how to edit the address I discovered that if I clicked on the "edit" under the phone, email section that the new screen actually did display the address info. I felt this was misleading since "address" is not included in the header section.

I also don't understand why we have to go through 2 steps when someone has a bad address. Rather then just change the address type from invalid back to primary you have to enter the new address and then go down and delete the bad address.

Ok, there is more but I will stop there. Overall we like that we can view more info on someone in just one screen but we feel like we do way more searching trying to get to what we need and bouncing around more trying to get everything entered we need to for a new record.

January 26, 2009 6:04 PM
 

CurtisHarris said:

@KimLudwick thanks for the feedback. I want to address each of your concerns individually.

1) We know about this one and are working on it; sorry.

2) Shelby collects nearly everything (attendance, requirements, attributes, assignments, etc) as profile codes; we knew the new representation of attributes was a bit of a risk for those who left Shelby and asked to pull all the profile codes over as attributes.  Our suggestion is to disable all the attributes you aren't actively using; this will remove them from the drop down list, but won't remove the ability to see the historic attributes for the individuals.  If you need some help disabling these en masse please let us know.

3) I believe this is just a misunderstanding. We didn't remove the old way to enter a contact record; the feature you are describing is simply a new way to quickly get a contact record fired off.  The old is accessible from the 'action gear' next to the person’s name in search or on the top of the individual detail page.

4) I'll look into this as you may have just identified a bug; this is not the correct behavior. In the mean time, please double check your security rights for address edit.

Hope that helps.  With any major revision there will likely be some who feel more pain than others; I expect that as you use it more you will find the benefit most have shared.  Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help further.

January 27, 2009 6:21 AM
 

BeckyH said:

A few things about the new release:

1) Why has the ability to enlarge an individual's photo been taken away?  Only when you choose to edit an individual can you see a slightly larger photo, but no longer can you click on a photo and have it pop up in its original size/resolution.  I submitted a Support Ticket about this and received an answer of, "This has been taken away for now."  Many of our staff have difficulty viewing such small photos clearly, and I would like to know why this decision was made when it already existed in the system.

2) Scrolling through a list of Attributes can be very tedious - I agree with Kim that we should be able to filter first by Group/Ministry first and then select from the respective dropdown. For smaller churches the current system might work, but for larger churches like ours whose ministries manage their own Attributes, staff are forced to then scroll down through a list of probably over 100 active Attributes to find the correct one.

3) Yesterday I noticed that when entering Unit numbers in an address (Address Line 1), one of two things happen - the Unit number either gets converted to an Apt number and placed in Address Line 2, or the system deletes the Unit number entirely. I submitted a Support Ticket and was told that this is probably a "software defect", but I'm concerned that other people who can edit addresses are not noticing this defect and thus losing the data.  I need to know two things: How long has this been going on, and what is Fellowship Tech going to do to help us retrieve all of the lost data?

4) On the Search for an Individual page, it'd be great if the gear also had the "Edit the Household" option. It's just one more step to have to "View the Household" and THEN click "Edit Household" if all you're trying to do is change a Primary address.

January 27, 2009 12:09 PM
 

fsoule said:

Curtis,

Isn’t it great!  When you just released a fabulous new software enhancement and your users ask ‘what have you done for me today?’  Then that is the nature of the software business.  And, this release is truly a fabulous release!  Our users have really given me a lot of very positive feedback and are asking me for future release information.  This is a whole lot better than saying nothing.  I haven’t seen this much excitement in a software release in a long time.

Keep up the great work and lots of kudos to your team; and, by the way, “what have you done for me today?”

Hope to see you at DC09 if we can make it.

January 28, 2009 2:28 PM
 

kjepson said:

We have received a lot of great feedback also.  As always there is some training to be done, some videos to be watched and the typical confusion that ALWAYS comes with change.

There is one thing that is for certain in this earthly world and that is CHANGE. :0)

I just wanted to comment on one other area, and I guess I should submit a support ticket as well.  When inside a person's name, and you select the + arrow next to contacts, I noticed that it will pull up our contact form but not any of the dates associated for the form we pull up.

:-)  

Thanks F1

~Kristin Jepson

January 29, 2009 3:58 PM
 

sandrews said:

Curtis and all, We agree with the problem with the new attributes, some of our attribute groups have very long lists and scrolling through all of them to find your attribute grousp is time consuming and frustrating.Otherwise, we love having everything on one page and being able to add assignments on the individual's page is great! I especiall like that there is now only one view and all the info is on it- what a time and frustration saver!

Susan Andrews

CBC San Antonio

January 30, 2009 11:29 AM
 

rmahoney said:

There are lots of things that I really like about this new look! Thanks for all of your hard work! One thing that I we would love to see is a listing of the participant assignments that a person has instead of the graph (that take a long time to load)... Could they be switched around and you click on a link to get to the graph?

Also- all the sudden our Life Group ministry assignments are showing as inactive (when they aren't)... I entered a support ticket but haven't heard much about it...

How is the Group Module coming? That would fix a lot of our issues with the participant assignments above because you can view the groups clearly in the new view...

Thanks again!

Rachel Mahoney

Quest Community Church

Lexington, KY

January 30, 2009 4:05 PM

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