New Admin Interface

A little bit of a self promotion. This morning we launched our new interface on our admin panel. (137 websites are awaking to the new interface today, the other 160ish sites are seeing the new UI in the next couple of weeks).

We have some clear goals around our admin panel. It has to be as simple as possible. We want the user interface to be intuitive and friendly (both for a positive experience for our users and because it cuts our customer support costs).

We have some lesser known goals. The interface has to work with some of the technology in place. The CSS has to be light and fit well into existing code. The overall interface has to be 'white brandable' for some of our partners.

Here are some of the decisions we made with a new user interface:

1. Our users vary in the technology they use. Unfortunately 7.3% of our users are still using IE 6 and we felt we had to still support that 8 year old browser. 15% of our users are on Macs.  Firefox and Safari both represents sizable percentages of users (so no browser specific code). Screen resolution also varies drastically, with 27% of our users still using the 1024x768 resolution.
2. Our users involvement vary. 40-50% of users login on a daily basis. Other users don't log in for months. We wanted to make sure when users first login, they would not feel overwhelmed by the new interface.
3. Our users vary in their technical capabilities. While we don't rank our users technical savviness, we know that some of our users are very web savvy, while other users are not as savvy. We needed to make sure the non-savvy people would feel okay with the changes.

If your a current admin panel users - we would love your feedback. Either email me directly at andrew@vin65.com, or leave a comment below.