Announcing the timeline UI + improved email support
Since our last release, we've been working to solve a problem that we've noticed in Nutshell: sometimes you need to go multiple places to view the lifecycle of a lead. We've always organized items like email conversations, activities, and notes into different places.
What we've learned from user feedback (and our own usage of Nutshell) is that it's often more useful to see an entire stream of activity. Today we released our new timeline UI, available for leads, accounts and contacts.
Timeline UI
This new interface consolidates all emails, notes and activities related to a lead into a single view. This lets you see exactly how things are progressing, whether you're corresponding via phone, email, or just internal notes. The timeline view on a lead includes any emails to any contact or account attached to that lead.
Clicking on a timeline entry expands to show the full email content or activity dialog, without leaving the current page.
This new interface is also now a part of our pop-up account and contact interfaces, consolidating several separate tabs into one faster UI.
Quick notes & activities
At the top of the timeline UI is a new, faster way to take a note or log an activity. If you get a phone call, just start typing your notes in this field, then log it when you hang up with one click.
Email forwarding support
As always, when you're emailing your contacts, you can BCC the message to bcc@nutshell.com to record it in Nutshell. Starting today, you can forward messages you receive from your contacts back to bcc@nutshell.com. We'll do the work and show the original message in the timeline view, just like it was sent to you. You can now track full, two-way email conversations in Nutshell.
Additionally, you can now track internal corporate emails related to a Nutshell lead -- like when you email your VP about a discount for a lead. Just include something like "Lead 1234" in the subject, or the first few lines of the body, and it will appear in the lead's timeline.
Other updates this release
We've made a number of design tweaks to the process builder, making it a bit easier to use. You can also now pre-assign a step in the sales process to a specific team or user, no matter who the lead is assigned to.
Our pop-up contact and account dialogs are taller, making them easier to browse, and we've updated dozens of other parts of Nutshell.
Future updates (including the iPhone)
Nutshell has a lot of exciting features in the pipeline, and in the next week we'll be announcing some huge new features on the Nutshell iPhone app. Stay tuned!
As always, we have an instant live demo showing off all the latest Nutshell features.
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Andy Fowler
Andy is the lead developer at Nutshell and has been working with the web since the 28k modem. He’s a master at turning designers’ sketches into pixel-perfect interfaces. Look for his bike in front of our Ann Arbor offices, and find him on Twitter.