'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler' — Albert Einstein
We’ve just made Spotto simpler. We thought it was pretty simple already, but, it turns out, not as simple as possible. Our new user interface, released last week, is our next step towards minimalism.
Spotto aims to do just a couple of things really, really well.
- It tells you where an asset (a piece of equipment or, perhaps, a person) is right now, or where it was last seen (and when)
- And it tells you what’s at a location right now, and what was last seen there (and when)
So we took a leaf out of Google’s book this time and made our new user interface so simple that it’s now just a search bar.
Since there are really just two main things you want to do in Spotto — find assets and see what’s at a location, we just have two views after the search screen.
It doesn’t expect much of you. Like spelling. The fewer letters we have to type, the better for most of us — and we do mis-key, especially when typing with a thumb. So we made Spotto really forgiving — and you can use any part of the name you’re looking for.
With locations — it turns out that the most important thing is to know how many things are there and what they are. So we didn’t add any other clutter.
And as far as users go, that’s it.
User training takes around 2 minutes.
Then they can use Spotto to find what they want when they need it, saving hours a week of wasted searching time.
They can respond quickly in a time-critical situation because they know where the things they need are right now.
And they’re more likely to lend equipment out because they’ll know where it is when they want it back.
This makes our demos very short.
If your organisation values the contribution your staff make to your business, stop wasting their time searching for stuff.
And if you want to make better use of your assets and reduce needless purchases because you lose things, or because people lock them up worried about them disappearing into ‘the ether,’ then make them visible.
It turns out that simple isn’t all that easy to achieve, but it’s very satisfying to see the lights go on with our users when they realise they’ve just been given a tool that they know how to use right away.