Countdown to v4: Dashboards and buttons and widgets, oh my!

Continuing our "sneak peek" series into the next version of FeedBlitz - aka v4 - this post is about how v4 takes the opportunity to add more dashboards and metrics.

The "always on" navigation I mentioned last time enables more opportunities to provide meaningful insight into your subscribers at more opportunities.  Beyond that, we've simplified the "in screen" navigation and replaced the cascading series of menus with clear, simple, task-centric buttons.

The Main Pane: Delivering the Goods

There are new site dashboards and multi-site summaries. We've added site thumbnails, audience metrics and Alexa rankings.

Within each site, you can see at a glance how your audience divides between the different social media channels, email and RSS. You can quickly see what's growing and what's not, essential data for the modern social media blogger and marketers.

Major task: The green button

At each level, the big green button upper right takes you to the main task for that screen or element. The green button always represents the most valuable sub screen at that point in the navigation. So, for example, at the site level the most important task is editing the settings for the site itself. At the mailing list level, it's sending a mailing.

Other tasks: Orange buttons

The orange buttons represent other significant tasks you can do. Yet more options are available in the rest of the screen or any displayed widgets.

Widgets

At many places in v4 you will find screen elements called widgets, like this one from an RSS feed:

Text in the lower dark bar is clickable, taking you directly to the applicable option for that widget.
Also note that we've tried making the screens more useful. There are no intermediate menus any more; clicking on a feed or a list gets you real data right away.

Next time, I'll drill into the mailing list area, to talk about the new capabilities and ease of use changes there.