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When you log in to your HelpDeskSAAS account today, you’ll notice a pretty exciting change awaits you. As of the last week, we’ve refreshed the visual application design, themes and header section of the HelpDeskSAAS application, including the logo and navigation bar. This post explains exactly what we changed and why we changed it.

The overall style of the old design was no longer consistent with changes we had made to the HelpDeskSAAS visual design over the last year or so. Instead of 8 different themes that covered the complete set of the design elements as colors, buttons, fonts, region and report styles, we decided to use more standardised look and feel. So the new design features a dark header background and light title with 6 themes, consistent with current HelpDeskSAAS standards you’ll find elsewhere in the product. Each theme now covers only the color of the navigation bar, which you can easily fit to your favorite website or company colors.

The previous navigation bar has been with us for some time. It is a standard tabbed interface, one that you’ve probably seen on many other websites and applications.

However, this tabbed interface was a little different from most others of its kind. As you can see in the screenshot above, we had also introduced a second-level Quick Menu layer that showed more options when the tab was hovered over. Some people had no problem with this, but many more people either didn’t know that the menu were there, were surprised by them, or found them awkward to use. In truth, Quick Menu really don’t really belong under tabs. For example, the “Log a call” option can be run directly from the Quick Menu rather than from the button in the Ticket details page.

The old application banner also had a large, unused area with logo image in the navigation that took up a lot of vertical space, pushing the more valuable page content just a little bit further down the page. We’ve taken back that space and tightened up the interface, so that more of your content is displayed on every screen. This is a small difference, but over time these things add up. We’re going to continue to try and save you space wherever we can, so that your content can be more visible and accessible on each screen you access within your HelpDeskSAAS application.

We’ve introduced a new, experimental feature with this new navigation bar. You’ll notice a search area in the right side of the navigation bar in a few frequently used pages. We did this because we noticed that people were doing a tremendous amount of navigation to search pages as they used HelpDeskSAAS. They would access a Ticket search, Ticket history search, Client search or Knowledgebase article search pages through a few separated navigation steps. This new feature removes that unnecessary step and allows you to move around your site more quickly and easily. In our initial testing with users, this navigation feature seemed to work well. However, we’re going to continue to monitor the usability of the search navigation bar and consider it an experiment for now, as we realise that it’s a big change for most of our users.

What we did not change — HelpDeskSAAS customers will notice that we did not change the existing navigation options through the Ticket list and the Ticket details pages. The links that you’re used to navigate throughout your help desk tickets are all still in the same places that they were before the new navigation was put in place.

So that’s the new banner and navigation bar changes in the HelpDeskSAAS application. We’re working hard on some other improvements that you should see coming out soon. Stay tuned and let us know what you think!