How it all started

We love to hear what our users think about our products; we're always collecting feedback about Trellis Desk via email and our company forums. Here are some of the things we've learned:

People like the appearance of our Trellis Desk 1.0 software. We're humbled that some of you think Trellis Desk is the best-looking helpdesk software around. A few say that the design is what convinced them to adopt Trellis Desk in the first place.
Customers have mixed feelings about the overall layout & placement of functions. There's some confusion as to where particular features are located around the ACP.
Some customers are requesting features that already exist. This was a big eye-opener for us. We've been receiving feature requests from users who don't realize that the functionality they're requesting already exists in Trellis Desk 1.0 — which means it's not easy enough to find.

Setting some goals

Based on the above feedback, we set out to revamp the ACP design for Trellis Desk 2.0. But before we did, we set some basic goals that the new interface needed to accomplish:

Reduce complexity wherever possible. Limit the amount of information and the number of choices presented to the user at any given time. Contextualize as many commands and properties as possible. Eliminate unnecessarily long menus.
Avoid burying functionality. Several Trellis Desk 1.0 ACP features are hidden in screens that require too many clicks to access. Due to the remote nature of these screens, the user may not even know they exist. Functionality should be no more than a few clicks away.
Minimize wasted space. Maximize efficiency by converting more of the user interface into actual, usable space. The Trellis Desk 1.0 ACP header design takes up a lot of room; let's simplify the design and devote more screen real estate to getting things done.
Hold ourselves to a higher design standard. We love great design, and we want to create a new interface that's much smarter and sleeker than anything we've built before.

Planning it out

With these principles in place, we started to ask ourselves a lot of questions: How long can navigation menus be before they feel overwhelming? How can we more efficiently surface important features? How do we maintain some degree of familiarity with the new design to avoid discomforting long time Trellis Desk users? We spent several weeks scribbling out mockups and developing prototypes of ideas that seemed interesting.

Let's take a closer look.

A new way to navigate the ACP.

We call it the zipline. Now it's super fast and easy to get wherever you need to be. Click a category, and you'll see a list of relevant subcategories instantly — no more waiting for another page load. Just select a subcategory and you're on your way.

But wait, there's more.

If you click on certain subcategories, you'll be greeted instantly with one of these slick action menus.

And what's this at the bottom of my screen?

The hoverbar sticks to the bottom of your browser viewport, so it's always visible. On the left side, you can see how many tickets are currently awaiting staff action. The right side will serve as home to some future Trellis Desk features...

A sidebar that's actually useful.

Remember how in the Trellis Desk 1.0 ACP, the same long list of sidebar options would appear on every single page in a particular section? Not anymore. The revamped sidebar only shows options that are specifically relevant to whatever you're looking at.

Help is just a glance away.

Many pages now have useful inline help located in the sidebar that explains the basics of whatever function you happen to be looking at. No more wondering what a custom department field is.

Better.

We've spent a lot of time working on the details. Once you get your hands on the Trellis Desk 2.0 ACP, you'll see why it's so much nicer to use.